High School Graduate. That was as auspicious a title as anyone ever expected for young Angela Barrett. No college plans, no artistic vision, no great ambition, not even a steady boyfriend.
Angela was a young woman who faced her adult future with all the exciting potential of a CSPAN2 broadcast.
Then a harmless infatuation nourished in an Internet chat room turns weird, and Angela is suddenly in possession of a set of brilliant blue sapphires that do much more than catch the eye. Imbuing her with amazing abilities straight out of a comic book, Ms. Barrett's career options suddenly get interesting.
But a comic book is hardly a Complete Guide to Practical Heroism, and the 18-year-old quickly finds that she's bitten off quite a bit more than she can chew.
It's said that diamonds are a girl's best friend.
Angela has a love-hate relationship with her sapphires.
Fate seems determined to pick on the naive teen as she struggles to harness the mysterious and frustrating power she's been given. She repeatedly finds herself at the mercy of bad luck and nefarious characters. Can an ordinary teenage girl harness an extraordinary force and triumph over adversity? Will she find her place in the world as a defender of good, or is she doomed to fall victim to the dark forces closing in around her?
Two years in the making, Cruel Summer indulges the Superheroine Peril fantasy as an action thriller and character study. At times syrupy sweet, disturbingly dark, criminally melodramatic, patently absurd, fetishistically preoccupied, and frustratingly teasing, Sapphire's story is told in a style that's often poetically awkward and alliteratively annoying, peppered with lamely wry wit and cloyingly obscure past pop culture references.
In Cruel Summer, nascent heroine Sapphire puts the reality of supernatural vigilantism to the test, giving the genre cliches of a hero's genesis, humiliation and blackmail, arch-nemeses and supervillains, crimelords and cops, weaknesses and limitations, relationships, and the ever-tricky secret identity a thorough workout and more than a few twists.
With a plot that thickens more with each chapter, a cast of characters that range from campy cardboard cutouts to (pun intended) multifaceted soul-searchers, and sex and action that runs from implied to titillating to disturbing, Cruel Summer could be the must-read blockbuster of the summer. But it's probably just the self-indulgent hackneyed literary stylings of a first-time writer with an inflated sense of self barely concealed by self-deprecating wit.
If you ever wondered how a superhero can possibly function in a real modern world -- how they get started, where they find crime to fight, why they don't get caught, and where they get their cute little outfits -- well, you probably have too much time on your hands. In which case you have no excuse not to check out Cruel Summer, double-negatives and all.
Part pulp fiction, part comic book movie, part 80's pop culture homage, and part lingerie catalog collecting run amok, Cruel Summer has proven one writer's obsession and at least three confirmed readers' recurring distraction. Maybe you'll enjoy it too.