Shattered by Lee Winter

Shattered by Lee Winter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I received an ARC of this book from Ylva Publishing in exchange for an honest review.


Damn. This is, unexpectedly, one quite good book. I had kept putting this one off because something about it looked vaguely depressing, and, while I tended to like the other works by this author, I didn’t do so at the same level of others – and some of those others seemed less impressed with this book. But then I read Winter’s most recent book, and had been very favorably impressed, so, I finally dove in.

One note before I continue: I note above that this is an ‘ARC’. That’s an odd thing to say about a book that’s been published for a while, eh? Did I get the ARC then take forever to read it? Is that what I meant in the first paragraph about ‘finally dove in’? No – when June 2018 ARC’s were offered, I was given the chance to select previously published books, and I selected two of the three current Superhero Collection books (I’d already read the third). So, no, this is not a long delayed read of an ARC I got long ago, nor a long delayed review of a book I‘d read long ago.

This is a hard book to write a review about. Many of the things I think of possibly mentioning seem to bounce against possible spoiler territory. So….

This book specifically two women. I’ve forgotten the age of one, though I think she’s in her thirties. The other is, if I recall correctly, 142 years old. 142, eh? That’s . . . old. Heh. One of the two women, the younger one, Lena Martin specifically, has the lead point of view for the first, oh, 64 percent of the book (65%?), before Shattergirl, Nyah, got a turn at the POV controls. Once Nyah got her hands on the POV, the point of view alternated between the two until the end of the book, though still favoring Lena’s insights.

Roughly around 1916 (or exactly then?), a spaceship flew through the skies (and broke up) and 50 aliens sat down on the lawn outside Parliament in London. The world was at war at the time, and people were on edge. The military marched up and shot at them – that was the first response, not an ‘Arrival’ (the film) type of military turning up, securing things, then sending in scientists to try to communicate, no, just point guns, open fire. Oddly no one died, for, you see, the aliens had certain powers. Powers that would allow them, later, to be ‘Guardians’, or ‘Superheroes’.

Long and short: this is an alternate history that branches off from our world in 1916. The alternate history ‘What If?’ question is simply: ‘what if 50 aliens with advanced powers turned up while the world was at warm what would have happened next?’ Well, the story doesn’t continue from that point – it leaps ahead to . . . hmm, something like 2017. Specifically to Lena Martin. Tracker.

Lena Martin works as Tracker, someone who tracks down ‘runaway’ aliens. She’s shown tracking down ‘Beast Lord’ at the start of the book; before returning home and being given a new assignment: track down Shattergirl. Rumors place her on an island of the coast of Yemen.

Superhero prose is a tough genre in a certain way – in the sense that anything might be found. Maybe the story will be light and fluffy, with humor (think Adam West Batman), maybe it will be darker, though with strains of sanity (Michael Keaton Batman with Jack Nicholson as the Joker); or maybe it’ll be out and out insanity (Heath Ledger’s Joker), and/or weirdly dark and insane (Watchman). You can’t really go in thinking ‘well, superheroes, comics, who reads comics? Who is the target audience? Kids? This’ll be light and fluffy’ because you’ll be dead wrong (or right, that’s the part where superhero stories are tricky, maybe it will be light and fluffy).

Here? Well, this isn’t light and fluffy. The world is crap, and the superheroes are breaking down. There is one twist, though, that you do not normally see in superhero stories – there are no real supervillains in this story (there are ‘bad guys’, but they aren’t really supervillains, and they don’t act like bad guys).

Oh, and another thing: people expect a certain thing from ‘Romances’, as such I’ll say: there’s a romance subplot, but this is not a Romance book.

Both main characters are tough to take, and kind of dislikable at the start of the book. Heck, they might have been that way by the middle of the book, but both grew on me and ‘redeemed’ themselves before the end, and I found myself rather enjoying both of them and the story.

Unexpectedly, this becomes my second favorite Lee Winter’s book, after ‘Under Your Skin.’

Rating: 4.75

June 9 2018




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