Nick’s friends are fully aware of it, and they make a point of laughing about it. Klune is entirely aware of how stupid Nicky can be. He’s possibly the dumbest person alive, but somehow that works instead of being aggravating. The side characters are pretty great, particularly Nick’s BFF/love interest Seth, but The Extraordinaries is Nick’s story and as a result its success depends entirely on him. Thankfully, The Extraordinaries is-well-extraordinary. Superhero fights are fun and all, but fun isn’t enough. The way to stand out from the crowd is to have excellent characters and compelling relationships. There’re like a thousand comic book adaptations, and it seems like there’s a new Marvel movie every week.
There’s a ton of superhero media out there. The fantasy is fun, of course, and while this is certainly a superhero novel, the superhero antics exist to flesh out Nick’s story: his fears of inadequacy, his relationships with his father and his friends, and his grief over his mothers sudden death.
As always, the charm comes from the characters. The setting and magic are arguably less creative here than in his other works-I mean, it’s superheroes-but that doesn’t make this book any less delightful. Like The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door, The Extraordinaries is a sweet, funny, gay fantasy romance. Nick’s extreme crush is exacerbated when Shadow Star saves him from a mugging, and Nick decides to find a way to transform himself from ordinary to Extraordinary. While he himself is a more or less normal kid-his father is a policeman, his mother is dead, and he’s on medication for severe ADHD-he is fascinated by the Extraordinaries, and particularly by the local hero Shadow Star and his nemesis Pyro Storm. While The Extraordinaries doesn’t get as universal acclaim as either of Klune’s adult novels, I went in expecting to love it. When I realized that Klune has a YA fantasy series as well, I was psyched. I loved it, so I read Under the Whispering Dooras soon as I could, and I loved it as well. My sister-in-law suggested The House in the Cerulean Seato me early in the year. Most of my go-to writers published something new this year, and while I read lots of books that I enjoyed, I didn’t really find any new authors that I can see myself returning to over and over again. With one major exception, my reading in 2021 has been defined by existing favorites.
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