Bolinger’s debut, the kickoff to a series, bursts with inventive superheroics as Johnny Churchill, a young man in the late 1960s, discovers that he’s imbued with curious powers: the snowballs that bullies chuck at him vanish just before hitting him. A woman who used to babysit him, Mrs. Underwood, reveals that much like her late husband, a distant relation of Johnny’s who claimed to have lived for centuries, Johnny is a Doxan, someone for whom “the energy field that radiates from all living beings” becomes shield, weapon, and more. Sudden wealth, a thousand-year-old journal, and a warehouse full of historical treasures back up Mrs. Underwood’s story. She also offers a warning: the Doxan she married had been “manipulated, threatened, attacked, imprisoned, enslaved, and pressed into military service” throughout his life.

Johnny, too, faces that fate when his actions during a bank robbery tip off the feds that he’s something special. Soon, he’s being interrogated, then given a deadly Cold War espionage mission that will, of course, have deadly blowback, as it won’t only be the U.S. interested in him. Bolinger writes this all with brisk clarity but a detached tone, observing the characters without digging into their perspectives. That means readers witness Johnny in action, destroying a federal armory or escaping a Russian prison, but have little sense of what he wants in life, what he makes of his astonishing abilities, or what he’s feeling when he offers to give his muscle car to a crush he’s just met.

Much of the story is told through crisp dialogue, while moments of descriptive action tend toward the flatly declarative. What’s memorable are inventive touches like dispatches from history captured in that journal, the clever experiments Johnny’s former science teacher runs him through, Johnny’s surprising uses of his ever-expanding set of powers, and the question of the hero's own future: what would it mean for someone possibly facing centuries of life to fall in love?

Takeaway: Fast-paced super heroics power this inventive series kickoff.

Comparable Titles: Marissa Meyer’s Renegades series, Douglas Smith’s Dream Rider Saga.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B+
Marketing copy: B+