A review of Meta and The Second Wave by Tom Reynolds

Connor Connolly, 16, didn’t actually want to be at the party deep in the woods, because that crowd never accepted him. His only friend talks him into it, but after a couple conversations, he leaves. That puts him nearby as a murderer drags a child away to her death. He tries to intervene, gets stabbed, and wakes up a few minutes later with alien wristbands that grant enhanced abilities.

Meta bands are the source of all superpowers on Earth. No one knows where they came from, and maybe a few people know how they work. They made their first public appearance over a decade ago, but after a cataclysmic event called The Battle, the public story said they all went dead. When Connor wakes up with a new set, he realizes he can take another shot at that murderer.

In Meta, the teenaged hero narrates his story of finding power, keeping secrets, finding a mentor (a Batman-type), testing his abilities, and confronting threats. Compelled to act when he sees people in trouble, he stumbles through increasingly difficult trials before fighting a creatively powerful villain at the end. His Meta bands don’t give him just one power but a variety of them, including an ability to freeze which comes up conveniently and isn’t mentioned again. The media dub him Omni, because of his multiple abilities, and you’d think new ones would come later, but by the end of the book, you’ll have seen everything he can do. I enjoyed it as a standard origin story.

The Second Wave picks up a few months after the first book with some observations on the practicalities of superness. Many new people have Meta bands now, and many of them don’t want to do hero work. Connor continues to make a name for himself as Omni by spotting these new criminals and taking them down efficiently.

Silver Island, the prison for people who misuse their Meta bands, has been working overtime to lock them away for good. The organization that manages it uses traditional government logic to handle the volatile people they catch and the Metas they work with. Some of them would like to just execute anyone they’ve prejudged as being a Meta who has misused power. We see the same rationale at street level with armed, volunteer SWAT teams patrolling their neighborhoods, looking for criminals who have powered down. The city has become a powder keg, and the good guys may be striking matches.

In this book, some significant events happen off-stage, and when they are revealed through heated accusations, they can come across as fabrications. That was my first impression, since I had nothing with which to verify them. Having gotten into the third book now, I assume the accusations are true, but it seems a bit much to roll with it. The story we have does a good job increasing the danger of villain confrontations, so I wouldn’t call these side events a plot hole.

The biggest deficit to both books is the first-person narrative. The sixteen-year-old narrator sounds realistic, sure, by stating the obvious frequently and overexplaining. Sometimes stating the obvious is played as a joke, but in the context of so much overexplanation, it isn’t funny. But the sequel doesn’t repeat the plot points of the first, such as Kid Super makes dopey mistakes with his new powers but prevails in the end, only to return to dopey mistakes in the next book. This young man is slowly maturing.

Both Meta and The Second Wave are fun books, and I’m already into the third one.

(Photo by Scott Evans on Unsplash)