Chapter by Chapter

Overpowered by author Mark. H. Kruger was a novel that sounded like it would be exciting and keep up a fast pace. The cover looked cool, the premise interesting and promising—in short I was very happy to get reading. What I will say by the end of the novel is that Overpowered is unlike anything I expected it to be.

               In Overpowered main character Nica Ashely has grown up travelling from country to country with her journalist mother, the last thing she expects is for her mother to get a job in the coldest place on Earth and to be sent straight to her father’s small town of Barrington. Barrington is unlike anything Nica has expected—it has a curfew for one thing—and is a small, quiet community where everybody knows everybody. The pride of the town is the company that practically owns it; BarTech.

When Nica is enrolled at the high school she ends up meeting Jackson Winters, an attractive, strange boy whose life has spiralled out of control after his girlfriend went missing. Immediately Nica finds herself drawn to him, but she doesn’t expect anything out of the rebellious boy. However when both of them are out after curfew together by sheer luck they both witness something strange and out of place in Barrington, a strange flash of light.

 Suddenly Nica discovers that the strange flash has given her and a few of her peers strange superhero-like powers. Wanting to uncover the answers to why the can suddenly achieve unbelievable feats, Nica and her friends begin to bring buried secrets to life and learn that Barrington and BarTech are not what they seem.

For the most part Overpowered was a good read. The plot was interesting and kept me wanting to carry on and find out what secrets this small town was keeping. I do think that there are a lot of things that happen in the story that readers will not expect to go down. There were a few issues that I had with this read, one of them being that in the plot I really just wished that there was more time to go in depth about certain things/more explanations for certain occurances. I think a lot of people who have read the novel will agree with me about a few plot holes, though if you ignore them the plot is pretty solid and mysterious.

Another problem I had with Overpowered was the writing, I had a love/hate relationship with it. There were times where it was descriptive and exciting but for the most part it felt very awkward. The novel is written in the first person point of view but there were countless times where Nica would be written thinking something that just did not sound like her character at all, one thing that comes to mind would be the fact that Nica uses the word ‘lad’. It felt very out of character. There were also unnecessarily long descriptions on clothing, setting, etcetra that made it very hard to get as into the novel as I wanted to.

I did like the romance that took place in the novel between Nica and Jackson, I can proudly say that the plot did drive the romance and made it very real. Everything between Nica and Jackson just made me all smiley and happy to see them together. Still, there were times when they would have their romantic scenes and they wouldn’t even feel all that long and I just wished that there scenes could have been extended to make their romance more realistic.