Ignite By Jenna Terese

Summary

What if superhumans weren't considered heroes?

When Scarlett Marley is attacked by an illegal super with fire powers, she doesn’t get burned, but now she has a fire-like glow flickering in her eyes.

With superpowers criminalized, she has no choice but to turn herself over to the Superhuman Containment Facility, or risk hurting everyone she loves.

Her normal life seems lost forever, until she is selected to be one of the first to receive the experimental cure to destroy her powers. In exchange, she must first complete one mission:

Infiltrate and capture one of the largest gangs of supers in the remains of once-great Rapid City.

With the cure and all her future at stake, Scarlett is prepared to do whatever it takes to bring these criminals to justice so she can return to her family. But this gang and their leader, Rez, aren’t what everyone says, and Scarlett begins to question everything she was ever told about the SCF and the fire flowing in her veins.

The cure is her only hope for returning her life to what it was before, but is that life worth returning to after all?

Positives

On a not really positive or negative note, the book is very differently paced than what I was expecting. It is marketed to appeal to fans of the MCU films, and while it does, it is a much more slow and thoughtful ride. While a Marvel film can be very thoughtful, Ignite is much less focused on the action and more focused on inter-character relationships and what’s going on inside their heads.

While as I’ll mention below, sometimes that thoughtfulness took up a lot of page time, I can’t really blame it. The different characters and their motivations are so well thought out, it’s incredible. They react in unexpected ways that still make perfect sense with where they’re coming from.

Ares was my favorite character, hands down. While ultimately, the author decided he was not the right character to tell this story, I would have loved to see a version of this story from his perspective. His conflict with his father seems like it could be rife with potential.

The conflict with superhumans not being seen as “people” also has a lot of potential to become a powerful allegory for modern judgements and prejudices as well. It was unpacked very thoughtfully in this installment, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it unfolds.

Negatives

Some of the scenes did get to feeling repetitive. There were quite a few scenes of them going for their “recess” at the compound. While these did become important at the end of the story, it took quite a few repetitions to get there. Other events did seem to have the same things happening over and over again.

We also spent a lot of time in Scarlett’s head. I get that we were supposed to, she’s the main character. But there was a lot of time where she was just thinking and nothing else was happening in the scene.

That is the one and only weakness I could find with this book—just a few too many “filler” scenes without much happening.

Conclusion

Ignite is a different installment in the superhero genre. One where perhaps we slow down and think more than rush into battle. And that’s okay.