Published: 2023
Genre: Poetry, Verse, Superheroes, Marvel, Science Fiction, Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: racism; mild swearing
Audience: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Summary: Miles Morales is still just your average teenager. He has unexpectedly become totally obsessed with poetry and can never seem to do much more than babble around his crush. Nothing too weird. Oh! Except, just yesterday, he used his spidey superpowers to save the world (no biggie) from an evil mastermind called The Warden. And the grand prize Miles gets for that is…
Suspension. But what begins as a long boring day of in-school suspension is interrupted by a little bzzz in his mind. His spidey-sense is telling him there’s something not quite right here, and soon he finds himself in a fierce battle with an insidious…termite?! His unexpected foe is hiding a secret, one that could lead to the destruction of the world’s history—especially Black and Brown history—and only Miles can stop him. Yeah, just a typical day in the life of your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
Review: I got this book thinking it was going to be a graphic novel, and it was actually a novel half in verse and half your typical narration. I have to wonder if other people, like younger male readers, would pick it up with the same preconception. Another preconceived notion I had about this book was that it would be about Miles Morales as Spiderman. In the end, the book was really just about Miles Morales the teenager sitting in ISS. The story was okay–it addressed serious topics like racism and the school-to-prison pipeline. It also had a cute budding romance between Miles and his crush, who sides with him as he stands up against a racist history teacher at his private school.
I don’t think Spiderman and Jason Reynolds are as good a combination as I’d hoped for. Another reader on GoodReads.com commented that Reynolds could have written the same story about anyone besides Spiderman, which felt really true to me. There weren’t really action sequences until the very end, and the climax with Termite felt totally out of place in a book that is mainly about a kid sitting in ISS and doing his homework, reflecting on how the school-to-prison pipeline had manifested in his life and the lives of others. I think that a Spiderman book can absolutely be about these things, but the anti racism didn’t feel really embedded in this superhero story.
Half the book was told in first-person verse, and it alternates with third-person narration basically on alternating pages. The style was interesting and could definitely be a jumping-off point for literary analysis!
