Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy

Summary from Goodreads:

From Julie Murphy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin', comes the first in a two-book origin story of Faith, a groundbreaking, plus-sized superhero from the Valiant Entertainment comics.

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…

Review:

First off, I have to say I cut off the summary from Goodreads at the last sentence because it ended on a preposition, mid-sentence. I couldn’t stand it, so I ended it wan an ellipses...Maybe someone didn’t realize part of the sentence was missing? Regardless, this was a super fun book. I’m a sucker for superhero stories. I love Julie Murphy. Combine all that to make a bisexual fat girl superhero who loves animals, and where do I sign up?

I have to say I love that more and more YA novels and now even superhero stories are embracing people of all shapes and sizes. Just because you want to help save the world does not mean you have to be a size two. I felt like overall this was really a body-positive book too. There was a little negativity, but I love that the main character had two love interests (of different genders!), friends that mostly supported her and at least never mocked her size, and no bullying at all. Normally bigger girls in books are bullied and picked on. And it was so nice to have a main character who was curvy and not picked on for her looks. In fact, she was singled out for being special.

I got really into the all the drama of it all. The TV show coming to her town was awesome. The love triangle was different. I also really felt bad for Faith’s situation with her grandmother. I knew early on that it was not going to go well. …Some of these things were all classic Julie Murphy traits. I guess the parts I had a tougher time getting into were the super hero ones. They seemed a little surface level/sugar coated –almost like they were made for a much younger audience. I was hooked on the YA drama, but the puppy napping villains seemed like something out of a children’s superhero cartoon.  I guess it got a bit darker when the villain was taking people (not just animals). But, at that point, I had it all figured out already and I was a little disappointed in how easy it was to guess. I wanted the suspense and super hero action to be on par with the YA drama.

All in all though, I really enjoyed reading this. I flew through the whole thing (pun intended). I could easily see this becoming a TV series or something very popular. I give it a 7.5/10.