The audio is read by one of the actresses on the Hulu show, which might be a draw. It's a fast paced story with lots of friend drama, superhero stuff, and a mystery. Easy to recommend at schools, a little less fun for me to read as I could tell where each beat of the story was leading. ( )

Not the worst Marvel novel. It’s hard to keep track of the many super-powered people and the threats to Earth-616! But I like these kids. ( )

The Runaways seem to be having a comeback. They have a TV series on Hulu, a rebootish new comic book, and then this book. Very cool.

For the most part the origin story of the Runaways is nicely woven into the bigger plot in the novel, and so we don’t see a lot of how they met and that sort of thing, but we do learn about a lot of that. And I thought Golden did it well. Still, it’s definitely a better read if you already know something about the Runaways (either from reading all the comics they’ve been in... who me??, or even having seen episodes of the TV series would definitely help). This is a book that definitely plops the reader in In Media Res.

In this book, there’s some new Masters of Evil trying to take over the LA underground now that The Pride is gone. Then the Runaways find out about a girl who has been taken by someone. And they wind up rescuing her, Allis, as well as a boy named Zeke. They have a back story quite similar to the Runaways and these two newcomers start causing quite a bit of friction among the team. So then they’re going up against Zeke’s parents as well as the Masters of Evil, while trying to also simply stay alive, and stay friends too. It was a lot of plot and here and there it did seem to bog down just a little, but, overall I thought it was a good story.

In this book Karolina is also a lesbian (or, I shouldn’t assume, since it’s never specifically spoken about in the book, so we’ll go with, Karolina is a wlw in this book). And while I would have loved to see her subplot bigger and maybe a little less angsty, it fit very well with the story.

I’ve liked all the other versions of the Runaways so far, and I definitely liked this one too. And it would be soo very cool if (like the Squirrel Girl novels) maybe there was a second book here too? (I know, I know, just enjoy what I did get. :))

I was given this ARC by Netgalley on behalf of Marvel Press. ( )