Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Short, genre-defying stories that look at people and things—mothers, relationships, language, infidelity, etc.—in unexpected ways. A prospective superhero has to make a choice between hero and villain, and neither are especially promising. In the land of Marketing and Platitudes, a couple have to keep deciding “What now?” A man discovers himself, and himself doesn’t discover a man. The mathematical precision of Janice’s “maybe”, a curious mother discovering the limits of language and storytelling, and an alien Florence swimming in circles while time and space march on in escalating cosmicomics of the boring and mundane and lonely.
Third Class Superhero is a quick read full of surprising gimmicks and unexpected revelations, precise details and laments about how language and other disciplines aren’t really all that precise in any particularly useful way, and characters that feel a little too close to home, even if home is a place you can’t quite return to ever again.
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