Martine Leavitt: Heck, Superhero

Front Street (Hardcover), ISBN 1886910944

Twelve-year-old Heck doesn’t feel much like a superhero when he steals from his best friend. And when he lies to his favorite art teacher, the police, his friend’s mother and almost anyone who asks him if he’s OK, he sinks into a sadness that nearly resists his super powers.

Not that Heck’s life ever seemed normal. But living on the streets while searching for his mother presents him with an almost insurmountable challenge. He needs to find his mother — soon — and rescue her from hypertime, that strange state between facing reality and running away. He needs to find her before the Social Services people show up to take him away.

Heck copes with her breakdown and desertion by almost shutting down himself. When he sleeps in a car, breaks into the art supply store where he worked briefly and unsuccessfully attempts to convince the landlord that he can pay all the back rent his mother owes, the little control he maintained over his shaky situation begins to disappear.

In his attempts to at least endure the present chaos in his life, Heck befriends an older boy who lives on the street, attempting to save him from his hallucinations. He pushes his best friend from middle school away, although the two boys possess an uncanny mental connection. As he searches for his mother, he carries out one Good Deed after the next, hoping to bring her back and establish some degree of normalcy in his young life. In fact, everything Heck does, he does in the name of a Good Deed, believing good deeds cancel out bad acts.

If all this sounds like a book too depressing to bear, you’re wrong. Half fantasy, starkly realistic, a fairy tale, a morality play — the exquisite writing sparkles, and the tension plays out so tightly that you won’t want this one to end. One of those strangely wonderful little books that invariably prove hard to describe, Heck, Superhero deserves as many crescents as Crescent Blues can give — a topnotch book!

Augusta Scattergood

Augusta Scattergood, a librarian and member of SCBWI, reads and reviews books from her home in New Jersey.