4.25/5 stars
Summary“Then the parents will probably start calling him Floating Baby. They may come up with something a little more original if they happen to be clever–but, frankly, most people aren’t. Then, when he gets older, he’ll become Floating Boy, and as an adult he’ll be known as Floating Man.”
Meet Ordinary Boy, the only average kid in a city where everyone is born with superpowers. No one knows why people are born this way, but for what OB lacks in powers, he makes up for in intelligence. When new trading cards for the awe-striking town hero, The Amazing Indestructo, are released in town, they’re all the rage of the kids, including OB and his friends. But upon trying to complete the collection, OB and his friends run into trouble and get caught up in a mystery that leads them in the direction of the town’s infamous supervillain, Professor Brain-Drain. Will the town heroes come save the day, or can Ordinary Boy solve this one on his own?
My ThoughtsOkay, so let’s start first with this: Obviously I am not the intended audience of this book. However, I have just completed this book as a re-read. I did, in fact, read this book when I was in fifth grade. I am unaware how many people know of the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl (I might do a post about that in the future), but this book was featured for that one year, which was the only reason I read it. To be honest, this was nowhere near the type of book I would have picked up at that age. It didn’t interest me in the least bit, but since I had to read it, I did, and several years later, here I am reading it again.
Again, since this book is intended for a much younger audience, I am taking into account how I felt when I read this book as a kid versus what I feel now. When I was a kid, I remember loving this book; definitely one of my favorites of the twenty from the reading list. It was full of adventure and humor and kids my age (at the time) trying to solve this mystery that was actually relevant, even if it seems dumb to older people.
The basis of this book is how a group of kids get caught by a major villain because of trading cards. Yes, TRADING CARDS. But as a kid growing up with Pokèmon cards among much more, something like this was on our level, and for those of us obsessed with them (which to be fair, I have never owned Pokèmon cards but I did obsess over Webkinz trading cards so…) we can relate to these characters in their seriousness and longing to go out and spend all of our allowance money and get every last card. And hey, maybe you bought twelve boxes of cards and still couldn’t find the one you were missing. This book plays on that idea of rarity and how scarcity works.
Even as a young adult, this was a good book. It’s fitted with little well-created illustrations that relate to the book, or come straight from the Li’l Hero’s Handbook that help us to be able to see what’s going on, or to meet the people or see the places that the characters meet and go to. They’re not on every page, but they’re presented in a way that brings a unique character to the book and can help the eyes glide across the page. It also makes the book much shorter than the 300 pages it appears to be. The book even has catchy chapter titles; for example, the first one: “The Astoundingly Unbelievable, Secret Origin of Ordinary Boy”. What part of that doesn’t intrigue you to read on?
I’m not going to go into details about the characters because they are a LOT of them in the story. None of them are given significant backstory (except OB and his close friends/family), but it’s enough to know what’s going on and who they are in relation to OB. The author also did an amazing thing here. He was extremely uncreative with the character names. “That’s a GOOD thing!?!” Yes, it is. This book is about a town that has, well, significantly lower intelligence than what we might expect. So in using names like Fly Guy, Plasma Girl, and the Tycoon, we immediately have an idea of what this character’s power is, but it does so in a way that gives the entire town itself a distinct character.
Another thing I love about this book, and can appreciate even now, is how this isn’t the story about the kid who gets the superpowers to save the day. It’s the kid who DOESN’T have the superpowers that saves the day. This book can teach us lessons such as how being different is a good thing. However, this book also goes one step further to teach us that not every hero has superpowers; normal people can be the heroes too.
There were some boring spots, and definitely some things that didn’t make any sense now that I’m older and actually understand the world (like how dumb some of the characters could be), but on top of everything, it is still a good read. This book was fast-paced, imaginative, and it definitely knew how to use its sense of humor, even on the level which children would understand. If your child enjoys superhero mystery adventure books, this would definitely be a great one to try. The best news: if they enjoy this, there are two additional books in the series that you can try out as well.
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