Girl Reporter (and others) Review

Welcome to another review from my side. After all the pulp I reviewed recently (still not ashamed, I enjoyed all the books I listed), I have something a little different this time. YA stuff, but good YA stuff: “Girl Reporter” by Tansy Rayner Roberts. I already read two other novellas by her (part 1 and 2 of the “Castle Charming” series, which did wonderful stuff with classic fairy tales), but I kept “Girl Reporter” on my wish list at Amazon until it was released middle of December. Then, as often happens, I just didn’t get around to buying it, didn’t get around to reading it, and devoured it in a couple of hours. Then I hunted for the other two stories from Mrs. Roberts also set in the same universe, “Cookie Cutter Superhero” and “Kid Dark Against The Machine,” and devoured them as well. Then I devoured “Girl Reporter” again. What can I say? I’m a fast reader, if properly motivated.

Unlike quite some other YA stuff, “Girl Reporter” has no ‘chosen one.’ It does have Friday Valentina, daughter of Tina Valentina. Friday follows her mother’s footsteps as a reporter, is a vlogger, and studies at university. She’s twenty and a pretty normal millennial kid. Her mother Tina was the first reporter ever to interview an Australian superhero, doing an interview with the first Solar (by now replaced by a second one) in 1987.

In the world of “Girl Reporter” and the other two stories mentioned above, superheroes do exist. They have existed ever since 1981 (as the little prelude, described like a podcast from Friday, explains to the reader), when strange alien machines landed everywhere on earth and started churning out new superheroes in a steady rhythm (though not the same rhythm everywhere). Australia is on a six-months rotation, meaning every six months one of the five heroes of the Australian team will be replaced by someone new. New future heroes are chosen in a lottery from the full populace, the whole ‘superherospill’ is a huge media event, spanning the time from when the lottery announces the next person to turn into a superhero to the moment when they first appear in full costume after going through the machine. That wasn’t always the case, however - which is important for parts of the story.

When “Girl Reporter” starts up, a new ‘superherospill’ is about to happen, the events from “Cookie Cutter Superhero” are already four years in the past, and Friday Valentina has known for a bit that her mother is missing in action. Friday (or Fry for her friends) has informed the authorities, which is all she can do - she has no superpowers.

Enter Griff, formerly Jay Jupiter, the only person ever to walk away from superhero work without giving back his powers (although the machine might have known about what will transpire during the story - it is an alien machine, after all). Griff has been on the run for four years, fearing his powers would be taken from him with force, if he was found, but nothing happened when he finally came face to face with the heroes again. He even has taken up the role as a sidekick for The Dark again on a part-time basis. Griff and Tina worked on a book after the events of “Kid Dark Against The Machine” and he’s become some sort of surrogate older brother for Friday (as the novel starts, Griff is 25).

Once Griff learns Tina is missing in action, he calls in several current and former superheroes (at that time, after the new superhero has been introduced, Australia for the first time has more female than male superheroes - 3:2), in order to find out where she is and what happened. This leads to Friday getting the chance for trans-dimensional travel, catching her mother in bed with a supervillain, and a lot of interesting revelations. Plus there’s loads of romance and making out. I’m not going to spoil more, but it’s a story with nice plot twists, a very diverse cast (ethnicities, sexual orientations, and disabilities all feature) and well worth a read. (Or two, or three, or more. As I write this, I’m contemplating a fourth time.)

What I really love about the book is actually all of the above. The story is full of interesting characters who defy expectations and don’t follow the usual ‘white, straight, able’ structure. Both Friday and her mother (who is a good businesswoman in addition to the reporter) recognize their relative prerogative as white, wealthy women. None of them as it turns out, is straight, though. Solar II (Joey Marriott, who is introduced in “Cookie Cutter Superhero”) for instance is the first superhero who did not have a disability removed during the stay in the machine - she comes out of it with her left hand still missing (she’s never had one in her life and thought she wouldn’t need one anyway). The rumour about The Dark (the longest-serving superhero since Solar I was replaced) being paraplegic before he went into the machine is confirmed, too. And some people also defy other expectations. Unexpected relationships form and are revealed during the book and none of them is a classic straight one. Friday gets to clear a few things of her bucket list, too.

It’s also Friday’s voice I love. She’s a young adult, trying to find her way into adulthood, trying to find her niche in the world. She knows she wants to follow her mother’s footsteps, but it’s not easy. And it’s the fact that Friday is normal - in a world filled with superheroes, the so far longest story chose the voice of a normal person. It’s not Joey’s voice who told her own story of succeeding Solar as his Legacy (a Legacy takes powers and name from a prior hero, an Original becomes a new hero in their own right). It’s not Griff’s voice who told his story of finding the supervillain equivalent to the Machine. Friday is no superhero and she wasn’t one in the past, she’s just a girl who grew up, like many, many other young adults, in a world where superheroes are a simple fact of life. She doesn’t even want to be one, despite getting the chance for a moment. She wants to be the next ace Girl Reporter who breaks the best stories about the superheroes and their battles.

The book also has a lot of funny parts. The one I still remember best is a short conversation between The Dark and Tina Valentina. After waking up tied to some kind of pipe, Tina says something along the lines of ‘I thought that was over, now that Solar is retired, I’ve had enough of it already’ and he says ‘well, I could have lived without it myself,’ to which she quips ‘right, it’s your first time … as bait.’ Given The Dark is grumpiness personified, seeing the close and easy rapport he has with Tina after the many years they’ve known each other is a lot of fun and can lead to slightly fuzzy feelings.

All in all, the characters in the stories are wonderfully ‘real’ in their actions and thoughts. They don’t appear contrived, they don’t seem different, because they’re superheroes. They’re normal people under the spandex and cowls and whatever. Which is, of course, the point about the Machine. And that is what makes the story such a fun to read. The twists alone wouldn’t explain a second (or third or fourth) read, because if you start from the beginning right after having reached the end, there’s no twists the second time, you know what will happen. But the easy way the stories read and the many funny situations that make you giggle or smile - that is why I enjoyed reading the book several times in a row. That’s why I also went through the other two, shorter stories, several times already.

Spend a few hours with “Girl Reporter” in an alternate version of Australia, I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it, no matter whether you’re still a young adult or not. I’m certainly not and I really enjoyed it.