Na-na-na-na-na-not the Batman book I was looking for.
Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu
Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes and Noble
Before he was Batman, he was Bruce Wayne. A reckless boy willing to break the rules for a girl who may be his worst enemy.
The Nightwalkers are terrorizing Gotham City, and Bruce Wayne is next on their list.
One by one, the city’s elites are being executed as their mansions’ security systems turn against them, trapping them like prey. Meanwhile, Bruce is turning eighteen and about to inherit his family’s fortune, not to mention the keys to Wayne Enterprises and all the tech gadgetry his heart could ever desire. But after a run-in with the police, he’s forced to do community service at Arkham Asylum, the infamous prison that holds the city’s most brutal criminals.
Madeleine Wallace is a brilliant killer . . . and Bruce’s only hope.
In Arkham, Bruce meets Madeleine, a brilliant girl with ties to the Nightwalkers. What is she hiding? And why will she speak only to Bruce? Madeleine is the mystery Bruce must unravel. But is he getting her to divulge her secrets, or is he feeding her the information she needs to bring Gotham City to its knees? Bruce will walk the dark line between trust and betrayal as the Nightwalkers circle closer.
There is no denying Marie Lu is a batastic writer. This was simply a breeze to read. I’ve been still struggling to combat a three month reading slump, and I simply flew through this book, well, like a bat. Her writing was quick, easy to understand, and superhero-ish as usual. The writing was not an issue at all – it’s, well, the other things that I found to be quite lacking.
I suppose my biggest issue with this book was with the characters. Bruce was our main character, and while I did like him, there was never a strong, strong connection to him. Yes, he’s usually a pretty chill, broody individual, and I totally got that from what I read, but I never really supremely felt for him. He was just okay, and him and Alfred were the characters that I actually enjoyed the most.
The problem is with the other characters. The supporting characters like Dianne, Harvey, Richard, Detective Draccon, and more just felt…well, they just felt like the cartoon characters in the background. They were just there? At times, I honestly forgot Bruce had friends and that they had real life problems.
And then there was Madeleine. I read 250 pages about her, and I still don’t fully grasp her as a character/villain/antihero. I simply don’t get her. I read another book blogger’s post the other (I AM SO FORGETTING WHO IT WAS AND I AM SO SORRY) about how YA struggles with antiheroes. By the end of the book, if you have any slightly villainish character that is doing anything immoral or evil, it usually gets explained away to make them “dark, complicated, complex” but ultimately squeaky clean. I didn’t enjoy her as a love interest, a character, or a villain. I never fully got her motives and motivations, and I so didn’t feel the ship between her and Bruce. Honestly, Alfred and Bruce had the best chemistry, and it should have just been about their epic platonic love story.
Yellow IS Belle’s color, so I mean, she has to appear for the man of black and yellow, right?
If you’re looking for a story with a lot of Batman action, it’s quite light on all things bat and action and Batman. It’s his origin story and basically it’s more psychological on how he gets to the superhero stage. I definitely didn’t mind that at all, and it was quite intriguing and entertaining to see how Bruce Wayne might have grew into the Dark Knight that he is. There is some action, but I swear this book felt like a weird hour TV series episode focused on trying to add in a little bit of this and a little bit of that instead of the big action sequences you might be looking for.
The setting was quite intriguing, too. I loved Arkham, and the glimpses that we saw of Gotham was done nicely.
If you’re looking for a light, easy to read Batman book, this is it. If you’re looking for an easy to read book period, this is it. It doesn’t have an extremely strong superhero story feel to it, so if you’re not usually into superhero stories but enjoy action and some psychology, this could be for you. It never really fully dives down deep, but I mean, Batman and Marie Lu are here for some fun. It just wasn’t really the holy hit show I was looking for when I picked this up. 3 crowns and a Belle rating!
