Rating: WARTY!
This is the second in The Reckoners series: Steelheart, Mitosis, Firefight and Calamity. Mitosis is a short pointless story available for free online. I read Steelheart and rated it as a worthy read even though I had issues with it. I'm not a series fan, and I picked this one up used, 'on spec' not knowing if I would like it or not, and in the end, I grew bored with it; with the tiresome first person voice, with the tedious bad metaphors which the author apparently thinks are hilarious, and with the total lack of anything happening for hugely-long periods. The novel takes so painfully long to get anywhere at all that it became tedious to read. I took time away from it to read a couple of library books and when I got back to it, I did not have the heart or the interest to read any more of it.
The story is removed from the abysmally named Newcago where Steelheart reigned, to New York City which is equally irritatingly renamed and where a different "epic" - which is what the super villains are called - reigns. She is known to the professor - an epic who avoids going bad by using his powers not for himself, but through others for good. So the author basically tells the same story over again, but switches everything around to pretend it;s really different, which is all an author can do in a series, isn't it? So, new location, but still a large North American city. This one instead of being covered in steel, is covered in water for no good reason other than that the author couldn't use metal again, right?! Instead of the villain being male, it's female. Oh wow, what a change up! Instead of it being personal for the main character, this time it's personal for the professor.
In short, there's literally nothing new here, and on top of that it was slow as molasses in mid-winter Alaska. I cannot recommend this and I am so tired fo series now that I feel like I never want to try even the first volume of another one.
