iBoy by Kevin Brooks

Today we gather to review what is easily the stupidest superhero book ever written: iBoy.

Sixteen-year-old Tom is your average teenage boy growing up in the wrong side of London, and always has been, and always would have been, until, on his way to see his romantic interest, he gets hit on the head with an iPhone.

Guess what powers he gets? Oh, yeah. Quake in absolute terror at the powers of unlimited texting, internet access, and built-in video cameras!

Excuse me while I chow down on a significantly less lame can on peaches. Then again, there aren't a lot of things peaches aren't less lame than...

What really made this book above and beyond terrible was that it was trying really, really hard to take itself seriously. In fact, the plot of the book focuses on exacting revenge for the gang rape of the romantic interest, Lucy.

Let's follow the plot, shall we?

Tom gets hit on the head with an iPhone and goes comatose for ten days, during which Lucy is gang-raped and the surgeon fails to remove the entire iPhone from his... wait for it... iBrain. Ba-dum, pshh! Hey, not my joke; blame Kevin Brooks.

Anyway, even though Dr. Daniels warns him to tell someone if his head feels abnormal, Tommy boy decides to go home despite the sensation of "a million billion bees" buzzing around his head.

Yeah, that sounds normal. Happens to me all the time.

Tom then begins to explore his newfound iPowers, which somehow manage to include zapping people from a shocking distance of three feet (pun most definitely intended) and creating an identity-distorting, bullet-proof iSkin.

He also has some actually iPhone-related, albeit entirely useless in a hand-to-hand fight, iPowers, such as hacking into literally any system, listening in on calls, intercepting text messages, and having a continually running camcorder hooked up to his optical sensors, or as I like to call them, eyes. Best witness in the history of ever? I think so.

But back to Lucy. Obviously Tom can't reveal his secret identity to her, so what's a newly-turned superhero with unlimited internet access to do?

Create a FaceBook page under the name iBoy and friend her, of course. Lucy eventually reluctantly accepts the request and the two start talking. Tom has some trouble keeping his conversations with Lucy as himself and as iBoy separate, but no biggie. Hmm. Boy on FaceBook who calls himself iBoy. Vigilante with the powers of an iPhone taking out Lucy's rapists. Boy who got hit on the head with an iPhone.

I WONDER IF THERE'S A CONNECTION.

*glares at Lucy*

But no, Mary Sue - oops, I mean Lucy - carries on obliviously. Until one day the big bad crime boss and a couple of her rapists show up randomly in the night, kidnap her, and take her down to Tom's apartment to accuse him of being iBoy. How did they find out, you ask? Well, that's a very good question.

I don't know.

Tom doesn't know.

Lucy doesn't know.

The criminals themselves aren't even entirely sure.

So amidst this whole big idiot ball of wibbly-wobbly I-don't-know, they take Tom down to a giant warehouse so he won't have a signal (gods forbid) and proceed to very nearly rape Lucy Sue again.

Boring old Tom can't do anything, of course. So what does iBoy do? He finds a signal anyway, because that makes perfect sense.

And what does he do with this signal?

He instructs every phone in the entire world to call the criminals' phones all at once, which somehow magically causes them to explode, because that also makes perfect sense.

All in all, this book created an absolutely stupendous (a word which here means tremendously stupid) superhero, and the writing was, at times, horrifically cliched and hackneyed. Did I mention the superhero was lame? While there were parts of this book that were well done, the fact remains that his superhero's greatest powers were static electricity and glow-in-the-dark-skin. Not cool in the slightest.