Abyss by Paul Bryers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I discovered, after taking this book out of the library, that it was the third book in a trilogy, and I haven't read the first two, so I've missed much of the backstory, and I'm not really qualified to review it. What drew me to it was reading the blurb and seeing that it was more or less in the same genre as most of the books I've written and am writing, so I was interested in seeing how other people do it.

In this story Jade runs away from her boarding school in Cumbria, England, just before being expelled, and her foster mother Emily meets her, and they are then chased by Jade's real father, Kobal, and escape from him with some difficulty, and they are joined by a Benedict, a long-lived member of a miliary monastic order. Benedict believes that Kobal wants to use his seven children, by seven different mothers, for an evil purpose. He had gathered six of them, but Jade had escaped (presumably in one of the earlier books) and Kobal was looking for the seventh. So the three of them set out to travel to Romania, where they hope to find the seventh child.

It was quite a pleasant read, with lots of adventures during the travels, though the denouement was a bit over the top.

One of the things I found rather disappointing is that Jade, the main character has superpowers. In this case it was integral to the plot in that she was bred for this by her father, who wanted to use her and her siblings for nefarious purposes, so she was not altogether happy about having these powers, and would probably have been happier without them, and in the earlier part of the story she rather regretted use them against bullying school fellows.

It may be just me, having this aversion to superpowers, at least for my main characters. Perhaps that is what  most readers want. Perhaps they like to picture themselves as having superpowers, and that is the attraction of such books. I suppose I was a bit like that as a teenager too. Up to the age of 12 most of my reading was of things like Biggles and Enid Blyton's adventure stories. Biggles & Co had one super skill, which made them different from most people, and that was the ability to fly aeroplanes, but it was a skill that anyone who really wanted to might be able to learn. Enid Blyton's characters were ordinary children who got into trouble and ether got out of it by their own ingenuity or by the intervention of adults.

When I was 13, however, we stayed with friends whose son, then a university student, had a huge collection of comics which he had been dumped in the garage. There was a run of Hotspur covering several years, so I was able to read complete runs of several serial stories, with each weekly episode followed by the next. Several characters in those stories either had superpowers, or access to gadgets which, like Aladdin's lamp, gave them superpowers while the possessed it. Some of the plots involved how they lost and regained possession of the gadgets. And so I pictured myself, like Jade in this story, having such a gadget, and picturing myself using it as protection or revenge against schoolfellows I feared or disliked. It was really a kind of excuse for misanthropy. A couple of years later, when I was about 15, I got similar satisfaction out of reading Gulliver's Travels, a kind of "the more I see of some people, the more I like my horse kind of thing. But it seems there are some people who never grow out of the desire for superpowers, and I wonder if they grow up to be people like Elon Musk.

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