I adored Karma Girl. I picked it up on semi-impulse after reading this review, and after having an interesting karmic experience happen to me because I had the book in my bag later that day (I ended up recruiting another member for my writer's group after he spotted it!), I decided to move it up in my TBR pile. And then I proceeded to devour it within 24 hours.
Carmen Cole lives in a world where superheroes exist- and heck, you can run into three of them just while shopping at a department store. On her wedding day, she discovers that her fiance and her best friend are having an affair...and he's the local superhero and she's the local supervillian. Carmen promptly snaps some pictures, runs off to her newspaper job, and exposes them. After that, she makes a career out of moving from town to town and outing superheroes and supervillians. (She's no naive Lois Lane any more.) She's especially clever at tracking where people's money goes, and she uses karma in order to track people down. According to Carmen, you find the superhero first, then you find the supervillain, because the villain always turns out to be someone in the superhero's life. (Interesting theory there.) After three years, Carmen's moved up to Bigtime, New York (har), where she's just managed to out one of the Fearless Five, Tornado.
And then, Tornado commits suicide. (Though this one ah, smells fishy from the getgo.)
Carmen (and her karma) feels horrendously guilty and quits the outing biz, and becomes persona non grata among most of the town. She ends up covering the society beat...until the day when she gets kidnapped by the Terrible Triad, who want her to find out the identity of Striker, leader of the Fearless Five. Or else she gets used as a science experiment.
What to do, what to do? Carmen doesn't want to out someone again...but on the other hand, she doesn't want to end up a nasty science experiment either. She decides to track down Striker's identity, figuring that it will lead her to the Triad's leader, Malefica. She ends up befriending/boinking Striker, and figuring out who he and the rest of the Five are- but not who Malefica is quite yet. And then things get REALLY interesting...
I enjoy that this book works with the stereotypes of superheroes. I've read some complaints about the alliterative names, predictable action, and ah, easiness of figuring out a lot of the superhero/supervillain identities if you're a reader. To which I say, that's the world the characters live in. You get superpowers from radiation instead of ending up nastily dead. You have alliterative names, (which to the characters, aren't necessarily going to raise "That's a superhero!" eyebrows because everyone has them). That's just how the tropes work, folks! It's a comic without pictures.
I love how this book works with karma. Can Carmen and the rest of the Five recover from what's happened? Is what Carmen did forgivable? How on earth can she make up for Tornado's death, or is that even doable? The characters explore this in a way that's much deeper than what you'd expect. I also love how Carmen uses her own "powers" of intuition and deduction (not to mention puzzle-solving) in this one, and how that plays out. As for the Five, they're pretty interesting people. Striker is pretty Typical Superhero (as expected, really, though he's not a bad guy to read about), but the other characters are pretty quirky and interesting. I am looking forward to reading about them some more in the next book.
Four stars from me.
Hi. I just wanted to comment and say thanks for the great review. I'm glad you enjoyed the book! ;-)
Posted by: Jennifer Estep | May 10, 2007 at 12:56 PM