Fish and Cherries Productions

Title: Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a Supervillain
Author: Richard Roberts
Type: Novel
Genre: Superhero

Summary: Remember how I said that being the kid of a former superhero was tough? Well, now imagine that both of your parents were former superheroes that were well-respected in the thriving community. Now imagine that that you’re also going through the troubles of high school while your powers are slowly emerging. And to top it all off, imagine that amid various happenstances, your new alter-ego is recognized by the community… as a supervillain.

That’s the life of the young Penelope Akk, the daughter of Brian and Beatrice Akk, and her best friends Claire and Ray. After their fight with a superhero’s sidekick is caught on camera, the three of them are labeled as a supervillain team call The Inscrutable Machine. Luckily, their identities remained secret, so they must lead double lives so that (most of) their parents don’t find out until they can publically and believably turn hero. In the meantime, they fight cosmic entities, intermingle with the supervillain community, and discover that being a villain can be… fun.

And that’s the greatest strength of the book: that it’s fun. A lot of superhero fiction tries to be taken seriously by being overly grim and severe (including mine, which I’m slightly ashamed of after reading this). Penelope’s adventures relish in the inherent absurdity of a world with superpowers and they don’t rely on outrageously high stakes about the world being in mortal danger. She just has to worry about the normal stakes of her abnormal teenage life.

Consequentially, Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a Supervillain doesn’t go into extremely minute detail of how everything in the world works or even on the backstory. Oddly enough, the way this is written, you don’t really care that it doesn’t. You’re always given glimpses and small tastes of a larger world that leaves you wanting more, but your focus is so captivated on the rich elements that the lack of an exposition dump is just fine. Are Lucyfar and Gabriel actually incarnations of their Biblical namesakes? Who was the Conqueror and why did he/she/it/they invade Earth? What’s the story behind Apparition, Marvelous, and Generic Girl? All these questions and more will not be answered in this book because they’re not important to Penny’s immediate story and concerns, which is precisely the kind of thing the first person narrative exists for.

Even without a lot of exposition dumps, the story does throw a lot at the reader, but in fairness, pretty much all of it is memorable. I remember all the characters, like Mech, Ifrit, the Bull, Mourning Dove, Chimera, She Who Wots, The Librarian, and so on, as well as colorful places like Lost World Comics and the supervillain-run Chinatown. Everything sort of comes together to make the world feel so alive and rich. The author is writing a sequel entitled At Least I Didn’t Blow Up OUR Moon and if it’s anything like this wonderful piece, I’m really excited for it. Any chance to explore this world further is greatly appreciated. I don’t know that a lot of people know this book is out there, but they really should. It’s a fun read and a fantastic story, so if you’re reading this, you should definitely check it out. But please don’t tell my parents I’m promoting a supervillain.