Looking For a Good Book

There is a moderately interesting back-story to this book and my decision as to whether or not read and review it. At some point the author made this book available for early reviews. When I first was ready to read this, I did a little reading on the author’s website (there were big plans for this book/series) and, largely due to quite a few negative reviews, the author pulled the book so that there could be a rewrite.  I thought it only fair to not read and review it. The book resurfaced in my queue and when I looked into it again, it seems that while the author did indeed do a rewrite, he has made the original available for reading and reviewing again. What I found was a pretty run-of-the-mill self-published action/adventure novel.

Cindy Ames is a gymnastics instructor. Her husband, Jonas, works for a clandestine government organization where he develops top secret weapons projects. One day Cindy gets a bit too curious and can’t help herself explore an amazing-looking suit of armor.  But this top-secret suit of armor, composed of nano machines, is only a prototype and not ready for use, but the nanos bond with Cindy and she becomes one with the suit.

While startling, Cindy quickly decides that being a superhero might just be what she’s been destined to do given her gymnastics background. But what she doesn’t realize is that the suit is actually changing her behavior and her attitude. Can Jonas fix the suit and save his wife before she becomes the world’s most dangerous super villain?

If this was pulp fiction from the 1950’s (ala Doc Savage or The Phantom Lady or Miss Fury) it would be just fine – it’s got lots of action, cheesy dialog, and some really amusing mixed metaphors (“The soldiers swarmed on her like ants to a picnic table.” then just a moment later, in the same paragraph, “…more troops continued to pile on top of her like a quarterback with a football.”). The dialog doesn’t get much better than this.

Sometimes a cheesy pulp story is just what you’re looking for, and seriously, I’d put this right up (‘over’?) there with pulp heroes like Domino Lady or Green Lama … heroes most people have never heard of (often for good reason).

But even this kind of pulp writing has a very limited audience appeal and I suspect this was intended more as a modern action superhero adventure, but the purple prose and explosive subplots really makes this much more in  line with a those 1940’s pulps. And … we stop caring for the main characters, which is something you should never do for this kind of fiction.

Looking for a good book? The Silver Ninja by Wilmar Luna (original edition) is a cheesy pulp-like superhero fiction that could find an audience, but it’s not a book I’d recommend.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Silver Ninja

author: Wilmar Luna

series: The Silver Ninja Prototype #1

publisher: Createspace

ISBN: 9781480237902

paperback, 362 pages