★★★★★ 5
Foster Care! Magic Paint! Superheroes! OH MY!
Format: Kindle
This was a great read. I loved everything about it. The artwork is vivid. The main character’s personality is spot-on. The humor was great.
Ashley is a girl in a world where she is herself and nobody else. At least, that’s what she thinks. Really, she’s a girl stuck in foster care because her dad’s in jail. She has a carefree attitude on the outside, but on the inside she’s really tender-hearted. Then one day a new family shows up, attempting foster care with Ashley. She’s living pretty nicely there and she’s made a friend named Luke. Then one day her foster mom comes home acting kind of strange. Later, Ashley decides to snoop into what’s in that mysterious suitcase her foster mom brought in and hid in a closet. She and Luke find paint. Lots of tubes of paint. Ashley puts them on her skin, because she “likes the texture.” This is where I think it’s waaaaay too obvious that what she’s doing has to be specifically made like that for the storyline. It’s okay though, they do an okay job of hiding it. Anyway. These paints are magic paints that give the person who wears them superpowers! So of course Ashley has to go and use them and be a superhero she calls ‘Primer’. But her foster mom’s job wants those paints she brought home back. So they send their roughest, toughest soldier to retrieve them. Ashley, of course, has a fight with her foster mom about it, and Ashley decides to run away, taking the paints with her.
Then obviously the soldier dude shows up, with a bunch of robots. There it just turns into your normal superhero fight scene, but then Ashley loses and the paints are taken except the teleportation one. The soldier, by the way, is named Strack. So then Ashley’s like, “Oh no, I’ll neeever be a hero” even though obviously she will, this is a superhero story. Suddenly her phone is ringing. It’s her foster dad and mom. She picks up their video call and it’s STRACK! He’s adult-napped her foster parents, of course. She debates going to fight Strack, or to just leave it. She goes with leave it until she looks up and sees a painting she made and this suddenly gives her confidence, for reasons unknown.
So then there’s another big fight scene with Strack, but Ashley is overconfident like she knows she can’t die, it’s a book and that would be devastating for little ones reading it. Anyway, she wins and frees her parents and they all live happily ever after.
So, this story ends in a cliffhanger that’s not a very good one. It’s just Ashley’s REAL dad seeing her on TV from when she went out and was a superhero the first time, and he’s like, “You’re not Primer, every father knows his daughter’s eyes, ASHLEY. See you soon.” So if I was hanging from a cliff here, I would be attached to it with a safety cable and I would be laying on the top of the cliff, with only my foot hanging off. It’s not much of a cliffhanger.
This was a great book about a female superhero. Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention, there is a page you should skip if you are reading to a child under seven. Page…. Let’s see here… oh yes. Page seventy-seven. It involves a gun and likely shooting afterwards, but it isn’t shown. I am a very sensitive person, and even I, an almost-teen was kind of rustled by it. Anyways, great story, lovely artwork, good book.
I’m rounding up from 4.5 stars.
-written by a tween
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Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2022
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