Bit of Hope and a Dash of Faith

~Faith: Taking Flight~
Book 1
By Julie Murphy
Amazon ~ Powell's

Faith Herbert is a pretty regular teen. When she’s not hanging out with her two best friends, Matt and Ches, she’s volunteering at the local animal shelter or obsessing over the long-running teen drama The Grove.

So far, her senior year has been spent trying to sort out her feelings for her maybe-crush Johnny and making plans to stay close to Grandma Lou after graduation. Of course, there’s also that small matter of recently discovering she can fly….

When the fictional world of The Grove crashes into Faith’s reality as the show relocates to her town, she can’t believe it when TV heroine Dakota Ash takes a romantic interest in her.

But her fandom-fueled daydreams aren’t enough to distract Faith from the fact that first animals, then people, have begun to vanish from the town. Only Faith seems able to connect the dots to a new designer drug infiltrating her high school.

But when her investigation puts the people she loves in danger, she will have to confront her hidden past and use her newfound gifts—risking everything to save her friends and beloved town.


The main draw for this one was that it features a plus-size superhero. Being plus-size myself, I was excited to read about a heroine who might face similar physical and psychological hurdles that I face. I went into this completely blind, save for the cover, so I had no idea this was an established comic book character (circa 1992), nor that it is the first part of a planned duology. I'm sure fans of the character will be able to look past some of the problems I had with it, but I was kinda let down.

Again, as a plus-size gal, I was looking forward to sharing a bit of background, commiserating somewhat with some of her struggles, but very, very little was mentioned about her size until the romance really started blossoming about halfway through the book. In fact, her size isn't even mentioned once for the first 30 pages. I was worried at first that it was a side effect of the super-power testing/discovery, because in the prologue she has a face-to-face meeting with someone after talking online and her size isn't brought up once. Not that all people are assholes, but if there's one thing that always gets brought up in an online-to-IRL meetup it's usually how you didn't expect _______ when talking online, and I'll give you one guess what plus-size people hear more than anything else.

I get not wanting to promote stereotypes, or normalize shitty behavior, but sweeping common negative experiences under the rug entirely doesn't help either. With me at least, it only served to disconnect me from Faith and her world. As I said, the first mention of her size is about 10% in where her curmudgeonly neighbor makes a crack about not believing Faith can run:

Miss Ella huffs. “That’s a sight I’d like to see. That girl running.”
Something inside me bristles. I am not a tiny girl. Fat. Plus-size. Curvy. Whatever you want to call it. Not many people comment on my size. Grandma Lou thinks it’s because I’ve got such a commanding and cheerful demeanor, but there’s the occasional jerk at school and then there’s Miss Ella, who still thinks that a woman’s value is calculated by the measurement of her waist.

So maybe if fat girls weren't so depressed or shy or soft-spoken then people generally wouldn't comment about their size? Or treat them differently because of their size? Um, what?

It's not that I think all big girls have the same experiences, or all need to act the same way. But for the introduction having nothing referencing or describing her size, there are still very relatable points later on:

For as much as I love The Grove and Kingdom Keeper and Buffy and Harry Potter and X-Files and Wonder Woman and Squirrel Girl and X-Men and every other fandom where I’ve found friendship and hope, one thing I’ve never found is someone having a crush on a fat girl. [18%]

I feel myself clam up a little, not wanting her to see whatever size it is that I’m wearing, like it’s some big secret that I’m not skinny. It reminds me of a short phase I went through in middle school, where I would cut all the size tags out of my clothes so that I didn’t have to be reminded of my size and so that no one would accidentally see the number inside my jeans while I was getting dressed for gym. But what was I trying to hide? It’s not like my classmates were looking at me, expecting to find some thin little thing hidden beneath my clothing. [33%]

So it's not as if Faith never has low self-esteem, or never experiences embarrassment, but that part of her life is extremely downplayed and seems more of an afterthought. I don't know, maybe I'm just bummed that I didn't connect with her as much as I wanted to—with her outgoing personality and extreme fangirling and love triangle shenanigans—but I really do wish there were more examples of fat teen problems than we got.

Now that I think about it, Faith didn't have many problems outside of her super-powered life. Neither her bi/pan-sexuality, nor that of her friends (gay and pansexual), ever had any repercussions in the community. Granted, there seemed to be a lot of LGBT+ representation surrounding Faith (yay!), but you expect me to believe there are no bigots anywhere around? Again, I'm not saying everyone has to have the same experiences, but that seems like a pretty big exclusion for a modern American city (especially in the Midwest). It's one thing to write about an ideal society, it's another to set a story in our world and paint it as the ideal society, omitting the problems present in it. It comes off as naive and disconnected, which is the last thing I think you'd want in a YA book these days.

I'm not sure this book knew what it wanted to be. The prologue starts talking about Faith's discovery that she could possibly be a super-powered psiot, and how she's recruited/kidnapped to this secret facility and— now it's some time later and Faith is back at home with her job and friends and school and normal teen life. We later learn what happened at the facility through flashbacks, but I gotta say it was more underwhelming than the build-up teased it to be. I assume this is due to having to stick to the established backstory from the comics, but it felt like the prologue was building up something epic that the rest of the story then overwrote to be a minor footnote—the spider bite or gamma rays—that then made way for the actual origin story. It's just hard to be teased with an evil organization experimenting on kids, only to be thrown immediately into teen drama and fangasming for the majority of the book.

That's another thing that might deter readers from getting this book: the fan worship. Faith is very into pop-culture, bordering on Deadpool levels, and is particularly in love with a made-up show called The Grove. She even authors a (very popular) blog dedicated to it. So when the show moves its filming location to her town, and one of the main actors starts warming up to her, she is understandably fangirly. Faith keeps it internal for the most part, but since we're privy to her internal thoughts this doesn't save us from the cringe. Thankfully, most of the squees and such are taken care of at the beginning, but if you're at all disinterested in or turned off by general fanatic behavior, it's gonna be a rough ride getting into this book.

I've been pretty hard on this one, but I think that may be due to some unusually high expectations I had for it. It really wasn't all bad. I shed some genuine tears and heartbreak with Grandma Lou's struggles later on in the book. I liked Faith's friends, though I wish they'd gotten some more build up before their status quos fell apart. I liked the romance(s) that Faith went through, though I felt like Dakota was way too forward with her backstory, offering up her painful family history to a "friend" she'd known for less than 5 hours. I found the villains interesting, but more out of a need for solving a mystery than actually well fleshed-out. Okay, so I found a lot lacking, but I'm still hopeful for the sequel.

Overall, this one was disappointing for me. I went in excited to read about a superhero who was like me, and I ended up getting confirmation of the old adage, "You can't judge a book by its cover." I'm sure fans of the comics appreciate a look back at Faith's origin, and perhaps those less jaded than I will find a connection with Faith's bubbly personality—I know this book has an audience who will love it, it just didn't include me. I will be coming back to the sequel, because there was a lot thrown at us at the end that I have to see resolved, but it will be with a much more tempered expectation this time. After all, you gotta have a little Faith.