All Tom’s friends are superheroes. Literally. Some of them have more typical superpowers, others are quite bizarre. Tom’s wife is a superhero, The Perfectionist. Her superpower is to make anything perfect. The Perfectionist has a nasty, scheming ex who is still in love with her, Hypno. At Tom and The Perfectionist’s wedding reception, Hypno hypnotised The Perfectionist so that she can no longer see, hear, or feel Tom. She thinks he’s left her, and gets on a plane to Vancouver to start a new life. Tom takes the seat beside her. He only has the duration of the flight to make her realise that he’s there – because when she arrives in Vancouver, The Perfectionist will use her power to make her new life perfect – and forget him.
The book is broken into chapters and each tells us about the different superheroes that Tom knows, his relationship with The Perfectionist and his previous attempts to convince her that he was there, or follows Tom on the plane beside The Perfectionist. The chapters are not in a linear order, but each chapter is well placed and the end is at the end!
I really enjoyed this story. It’s the kind of book that you will want to give to everyone you know if you love it yourself. I can’t see why anyone would dislike this, even if you don’t like love stories, this one is completely free of cheesiness.
Kaufman’s superheroes are not the comic book, costume wearing, world-saving characters we are all familiar with. There are 249 of them in Toronto. Many of their powers are comedic, others are useless, and nearly all of them you will recognise as belonging to real people as well. I finished the book convinced that some people I know are superheroes too, I may even be one!
A strange but lovely thing about this book is that the pages are really soft! They’re quite thick and kind of glossy. I just couldn’t stop myself stroking them.
The thing I would criticise about this book is the price. The RRP is £7.99 and it’s £5.99 on Amazon. It’s a really slim volume and some people will definitely be put off by the amount of book you get for your money. I’m not, because I enjoyed the story so much and the pages are so strokable!
