Black Widow: Forever Red (Black Widow Novels, #1)

by Margaret Stohl

[pamela]

Black Widow is without a doubt one of my all time favourite Marvel Superheroes. She's strong and kickass just being herself. She's a Superhero because she's awesome, and not through any mutation or nuclear accident. She's suffered, been physically, mentally and emotionally abused. Despite this she has remained strong, and essentially good; rising above her tragic past without letting it control her. Black Widow IS what Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson's 'Millenium Cycle' should have been.

I enjoyed 'Forever Red' much more than I thought I would. Margaret Stohl's YA novel is my first foray in to the Marvel Universe outside of the Graphic Novel. She did a remarkable job of writing fun, interesting and likeable characters. The plot was exciting, good and evil were not black and white, there was personal growth, emotional development and the action was, for the most part, well developed and believable.

One issue I did have with 'Forever Red' was the unfortunate side effect of things being predictable. There were characters who's fate you could guess, simply by virtue of their continued existence altering the finely crafted, already existing, Marvel universe. This removed a lot of the emotional impact of some of the novel's events as you simply knew that these events weren't part of the wider story arc.

Some of the final action sequences could also have been a little less busy and over - ambitious. There was a, quite frankly, ridiculous scene in which one of the teenaged protagonists attempts to hotwire a motherboard abd CPU to jam a USB in to it. She pulls wires, there are sparks, she re-routes and then quite literally smashes there USB on to there motherboard. The whole scene made me painfully aware that Stohl doesn't seem to know how motherboards and CPUs work, let alone look like, making the otherwise well crafted plot seem quite silly in the end. (FYI a motherboard has an inbuilt USB port... directly on the board).

Overall I enjoyed reading 'Forever Red'. It was fun, and a good addition to an already exciting Marvel Universe. I will definitely follow the exploits of the Black and Red Widow's in future!