Playing for Keeps

Rating NR Genre sci-fi Author Mur Lafferty Publisher Swarm Press

Have you ever wished for a super power?  Maybe the ability to fly, or climb walls, or bend steel in your bare hands.  Well, make sure you’re specific when you make that wish, or you might end up with the power to summon elevators, or never drop a bar tray, or know everyone’s favorite meal.  Or, if you’re Keepsie Branson, the ability to keep everything you own.

Welcome to Seventh City, where villains terrorize the citizens, from Seismic Stan and his earth-rocking tremors, Doodad’s flying machines, and Clever Jack’s impossible luck.  Fortunately, an Academy of Heroes stands to oppose them – Pallas, The Crane, Heretic, Tattoo Devil, and White Lightning will keep everyone safe and secure.  But if you want to join this academy, you better have a useful power, and if you are part of the third generation to develop powers, odds are you don’t.  So you’ll be better off with the other Third Wavers at Keepsie’s Bar on Thursday nights, drinking away your sorrows and complaining about the super heroes knocking down another building.  

But this Thursday is different – early in the day, Keepsie was caught up in a fight between Doodad and White Lightning, and Doodad slipped a golf-ball sized something in her pocket.  Now, the Academy wants it.  Keepsie applied to the Academy once, but her power to freeze solid anyone who tries to steal from her just wasn’t strong enough for them.  Using it to keep this thing – whatever it is – from them is too much for her to pass up.  And later that night, things get even more complicated for Keepsie when she finds the villain Clever Jack sitting next to her lost and found bin, frozen solid with the object Doodad slipped her in his hand.  With both sides after something Keepsie now owns, she and her friends are forced to choose between the charismatic villains and the oppressive heroes.  What is this object, and which side deserves it?

Mur Lafferty puts a new spin on the super hero genre with this novel.  While she’s got the usual range of super-powered do-gooders and baddies, even they get a twist, from Tattoo Devil, who fights by animating the tattoos on his body, to The Crane, whose white wings are more burden than blessing thanks to his obsessive compulsive disorder.  But where this novel really shines is in the “lame” powers of the Third Wavers.  Balancing bar trays, learning by smell, super strength that lasts only moments, keeping everything you own – watching each power develop in delightful and unexpected ways is where the real fun is.  Playing for Keeps has a sense of humor about itself and its genre, but it doesn’t blink at complex choices, either.  The novel forces its protagonists – and us – to ask, “Who are the heroes, who are the villains, and which am I?”