Spandex and the City

by Jenny T. Colgan

LOCAL GIRL SWEPT OFF HER FEET
Mild-mannered publicist Holly Phillips is unlucky in love. She's embarrassed beyond belief when the handsome stranger she meets in a bar turns out to be 'Ultimate Man' - a superpowered hero whose rescue attempt finds her hoisted over his shoulder and flashing her knickers in the newspaper the next day.
But when Holly's fifteen minutes of fame make her a target for something villainous, she only has one place to turn - and finds the man behind the mask holds a lot more charm than his crime-fighting alter-ego.
Can Holly find love, or is superdating just as complicated as the regular kind?

• ISBN10: 0356505448
• ISBN13: 9780356505442
• Publish Date: 18 May 2017 (first published 5 January 2017)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Orbit
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 368
• Language: English

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

light superhero fun Holly Phillips is single and looking for love, however she doesn't expect that her next moment is going to be flashing her knickers at the press as she's being rescued by Ultimate Man; Centerton's own superhero.  Holly keeps finding herself in trouble and having to be rescued and Ultimate Man finds her attractive, but can he allow himself to love; after all his attraction is keeping her in danger.
 
It's fun, light and from the point of view of a superheroes girlfriend, it pokes loving humour at a lot of superhero tropes and is dedicated to Mary Sues everywhere. Holly is a fun character with a lot of spunk and you can tell that the author had a blast writing it.

[Leah]

DNF.

I was liking this, I wasn't loving it then a few editing issues bugged me so I decided to put it down. The first was the fact Holly gets her computer hacked, so Ultimate Man can ask her out (because phones don't work??? IDK) and she goes to his house, wearing her "go-anywhere" black dress, somehow turns her phone off in the process after telling her housemate that if she doesn't hear from her by morning, she could call the police, and is then surprised to return home the next day, having stayed over at this strangers house, this vigilantes house, to find the police. And, apparently, despite no mention of a change of clothes, she's now magically wearing a red skirt. And it must literally just be a red skirt, because she was wearing a dress when she left. *Rages*

Then, the Internet dies. And it causes mass hysteria, because duh. Twenty years ago phones were just made for texting and calling, but the Internet dies and people forget how to function. ANYWAY. Holly states that the Internet was, since High School, part of her every waking minute. Holly is 26, and according to herself, she was 12 when the new Millennium came in, which means that she was in secondary school (because it was secondary school she attended, since she was in England before moving to America) from 1999-2003. The Internet was not that big of a thing during those years, at all. It's only really come to prominence with the invention of smartphones, the first of which wasn't even released until 2007 and likely didn't hit the mainstream til a bit after that. So it's physically impossible, unless Holly is lying about how old she was when the Millennium came in, to have the Internet as part of her every waking moment. Her phone in those years would have been a clunky Nokia, only capable of making phone calls and sending text messages and playing Snake. Computer lessons would have taken place maybe once or twice a week, and even then you would be making Powerpoint presentations or playing games.

I try not to get riled up. I know authors make mistakes, but I do get riled up. It does irritate me when authors can't properly age their characters appropriately, or assume that smartphones were a thing in the early 00s. When they have their character go out in one outfit, and somehow magically have an entirely different outfit on the next day (that she had been wearing for two days, no less, according to her flatmate?????).

It's just infuriating. It's even more so when you're the same age as the character, I'm actually younger, since in 2017 Holly would be 29 but this is all stuff I remember, this is stuff I am aware of which makes it worse when you read such silly things that are so easily proven inaccurate via Google (is that ironic?). This is why timelines are SO important. People just assume the Internet has been this thing we're addicted to forever, and yet, it wasn't back in the early 00s. In the early 00s, I don't even think WiFi was a thing, because you had to dial up with those horrible noises, etc. It's all so, so easy to disprove.

So, no. I wanted to like this book so much, especially because I love superhero shows. So I love the idea of a superhero romance book. It just needed to have its homework done properly. Or, if you don't want to have to do your homework properly, don't even mention stupid little takeaways like that, because it could have been lifted out without much notice, and I wouldn't have got all riled up.