How to Become a Henchman, A Novel: The Henchman's Survival Guide: 1

I really enjoyed the world created by Ms. Bennett. It is amusing, but very intriguing and believable. Her characters are quite well-drawn and easy for the reader to accept in this world full of villains, heroes and common folk that could be all too real in the near future. I really like the author's ability to create a believable, relatable storyline that can be pictured readily in the reader's mind. Too often today books relate a story without drawing the readers into the world where characters and action exist. There is no such semi-empty writing here! This is the first book I have read by the author but will not be the last. I highly recommend "How to Become a Henchman".

Ever since J. Bennett wrote her hard-hitting urban fantasy Girl With the Broken Wings, I've been wondering what she'll come up with next. How about... superheroes? In a dystopian town taken over by superhero "semi-reality shows," where the monologues are staged and the punches are real? Featuring a level-headed, down-on-her-luck girl forced to discover How to Become a Henchman."RTS - Ride The Storm," Alice tries to tell herself. She might be in more danger from corporate-sponsored heroes than the equally sponsored villains, but what hurts most was the time one decidedly renegade villain blew up the restaurant she works at. Now the only way to pay for college, get out of this camera-crazed town, and just maybe have a hand in making a saner world is to start winning the Fame Game herself. If she can get through a brutal audition against scheming "allies," hulking but troubled giants, and her own best friend. Henchman is half satire and half ground-level adventure, and Bennett pulls no punches in either.

Well, that was a thoroughly enjoyable romp! There's plenty of action, plenty of suspense, a real sense of danger amongst the themes of a world where nothing is real. One of the things I enjoyed about reading the action scenes specifically, is Bennett is skilled at describing the action well enough to picture it in my mind's eye. I can see the whole fight scene play out on the stage of my imagination; something that many writers just aren't able to do with me. But, like all good SF books, this one uses the setting and story to talk about some real issues we see barreling into headlong. In fine SF tradition, she does a great job at pulling us back, giving us a 20-year-view of a possible future and asking the question "is this what we want for ourselves? 'Cause this is where we're headed".Again, great read. Very fun and breezy (I don't know how a book can be breezy, but it feels like the right word to use) but there's enough there to really chew and discuss after you have a chance to think about it.Lastly, I like that the protagonist is written as a real person and as such I don't reeeally like her as a person. This is good! Too many main characters are written in a way where they always have the perfect line for every situation (looking at you, Taipan and The Martian) and that their character, morality, and outlook are perfect for the world they live in which just isn't for real day to day. Alice has some extremely strong convictions and they do not jive well with the world she lives in. It ends up making the character have friction with the people around her, making her more bitter, and her peers are either exasperated by or pity her. Unlike in other fictional tales, where those convictions perfectly slot into the zeitgeist of the world they appear and only seem to act as the missing key to all the ills, this is written closer to reality where we oftentimes just see a jerk without understanding the motivation (then come to understand after the fact).I sincerely look forward to the next installment!

you can see the parallels between smartphones and their wrist things, streams and twitter/facebook, as well as many other trends that our society is barreling toward. The author also seems to get up on the proverbial soap box on more than one occasion.All that being said I went through the whole book in two sittings and enjoyed the entire time. All the characters seem multi-dimensional, even when they were going out of their way to meet a specific persona archetype.My only real dislike for the book was it kept saying Zir and ze interchangeably when talking to/ about one single person. I have no idea what that ever meant. at first i thought that ze was a reference to the smart watch avatar things that everyone seems to have, but later they started saying it while describing a fight. then i thought it might have meant assistant robots that were with this person or that, but that didn't fit the context clues either. It just ended up being half a page or so of confusion every time they started using it.

A story about a reality show about superheroes and villains. It was decent the author developed the main character to point where you can’t blame the character for the choices she makes. The author presented good examples of how corrupt and addictive is social media and pokes fun how society is becoming more dependent on social media instead of content of character. Still this book is abit dry, yet promising. I am Looking forward to reading the next book