Superman's Cape - Brian Spangler

GENRE:  Adult Fiction
FORM: eBook

SYNOPSIS (from Goodreads):

When Sara Connely is asked what life is like today, she answers with the simple words, ‘life goes on.’ The life she and her boys enjoyed the last dozen years is gone. Sara struggles to cope with the death of her husband and doing so with two young boys, and no money, is almost too much to ask.

Life does go on, but when Sara’s oldest boy becomes lost in Croatan National Forest, life comes to a stop.

Twelve-year-old Kyle Connely doesn’t know the woods. He doesn’t know the wildlife. He doesn’t know how to get home. Lost in the wilderness, he faces dangers the likes of which he has never seen. Kyle’s time is running out. A hurricane is looming, and in its path is the coastal forest he is trying to survive.

Jacob Hanson has a gift. An intuition. An insightfulness. And it has helped him find success. But his gift turns into a curse as he becomes an unwilling participant in Kyle's plight.

What Jacob Hanson doesn't know is he also holds the key to Sara’s past and the lifetime she lost with her husband.

REVIEW:  Superman’s Cape draws you in straight from the beginning with the sad tale of how a mother (Sara) and her two boys lost their father. Immediately, especially as a mother, I was sympathetic and attached to this story. Once hooked, it took no effort to rope me into this book – a family going through tragedy, finding more along the way, a man with a special gift; how their lives are colliding.

Since the book was told from a variety of perspectives, you were able to see the story from multiple points of view, which was very effective in this case. I found it especially interesting in the case of Jacobs half of the book, seeing him from different angles as his gift took form and interrupted his life, it painted a picture that was a bit painful yet at the same time interesting to watch. Jacob is a mystery bigger than Kyle being lost in the woods. What is going on seems to shift and take different forms until you find the unexpected answer at the end.

For Sara and Kyle’s half of the book, I was filled with so much compassion and hurt for that family. I cannot imagine cooping with such tragic loss only to be thrown into the mix of another devastating event. Their story was so nicely told all the way up until the end, where things started to wrap up a little too quickly for me. Being so intimate with Kyle in the woods, I would have liked to have known the point of being carried out of the woods to his recovery. Not in so much detail mind you, but there seems to be a gap; seeing as how everyone was trapped in the trailer, huge storm coming, and Kyle being so close to death…. (I apologize if that seemed spoiler-y in anyway, but I’m thinking most of the information given here was in the synopsis as well..)

I will say that while the story wrapped you in from the beginning and kept you reading until you found out what’s going to happen, many, many times I found the writing to be extremely graphic. Reading mostly Young Adult and Drama/Romance novels, this is something I’m not used to. Even some of the crime and mystery books I’ve read, the attention to the gory details was never all that intense. I do think that the details did add to the experience of the book some, but it walked the fine line of overkill in my opinion. Another small annoyance - and I don’t know why this bothered me so much, but to use the word “giggled” for a man seems wrong, it seems teenagy and girly to me. The word was also used semi-frequently. Synonyms go a long way! “Chuckled” seems more adequate for a man.