We Could Be Villains - Megan McCullough

★★★☆☆

Very fast paced and fun formatting, but you REALLY have to suspend your disbelief

Rosemary Collins had no idea her favorite film franchise was just a cover for the fact that superheroes are real … and the main villain just recruited her.

Narrative Voice: 1st person
Cussing/profanity: 0/5
Drug/alcohol use: 0/5
Kissing: 1/5
Sex/nudity: 0/5
Violence/gore: 1/5

In the end, I realized I am not the target audience, but I picked this up because of the cover (GORGEOUS) and the premise, and to support a fellow indie author.

I like the idea of big film studios frantically covering real life disturbances as simply fiction; nothing more than an expensive movie promo. So I was excited to pick up a book that isn’t in my go-to genre! The formatting of this book (disclaimer, I read on kindle) is unique with social media posts, interview transcripts, and web forum excerpts. That was a fun touch. And yay for a CLEAN READ! However, for a book marketed as a superhero book … there are basically no superheroes! They are instead absent doing … something somewhere else?? The plot is super fast-paced, maybe a bit too speedy for me. What lost me more, was the narrative. Told in the first person by main character Rosemary, to me, it felt scattered and slightly obnoxious. (People who live and breathe a fandom are cringey and hard for me to take) Other readers may love Rosemary for it, and relate to her beautifully. As for suspending my disbelief, there were certainly some plot points that yanked me out. A 16yo “tech-genius” hacking into the CIA in 5 MINUTES? Yeah, that was hard for me to swallow. VIGIL also felt disproportionately small for all their abilities. You got, what, six people vs a much larger, better established evil organization? Despite the effort to tell me otherwise, the good guys felt vastly low budget with their conveniently easy victories. The tonal inconsistencies of the juvenile writing style did not make this feel like a serious book, but like it was trying to be a graphic novel, or a movie, or even fanfiction, which is not for me. (there’s quite a bit of stylized fragment sentences.) I felt like this was written for movie fans and not readers. All that said, while WCBV is the geekiest thing I have ever read, it’s a decent debut with a beautiful cover, it just wasn’t what I wanted.

Younger readers and diehard fans of Marvel should definitely give this a shot!

3/5 would recommend