Book Reviews
Heck Superhero by Martine Leavitt
Reading level: Grades 4–6
Just one good deed. If Heck can save one person from evil forces—say, help a lost little girl find her mother in the mall—maybe his curse will be lifted. Then Heck Superhero will no longer be a boy with a vicious toothache, evicted from his apartment, searching for a mother mired in depression.
Unfortunately, life is a lot more serious than a comic book, and 13-year-old Heck isn't a superhero. He is convinced his mother has gone into hypertime—a floating state between coexisting realities—and he uses the same coping technique himself. Just as Superman can be dead in one comic and alive in the next, Heck Superhero imagines he'll pull off remarkable feats of good even while reduced to sleeping in a car.
Identifying with Heck
Heck is the kind of protagonist readers will embrace and root for. In fact, they will enter hypertime themselves, wanting to simultaneously shake and hug him. Spence, Heck's best friend, finds himself in this predicament regularly, trying to help his buddy even as Heck evades him during his three miserable roller-coaster days searching for his mom.
From the sidelines, readers will groan as Heck makes one sweet but misguided decision after another, giving away money that he could have used to buy food, deflecting the one adult who really tries to help, and going along with Marion, the older mentally ill boy who wants to release the "pocket creatures" from the fifth planet.
STEPS TO RESPECT Lessons in Heck Superhero
STEPS TO RESPECT teachers will find rich fodder in Heck Superhero. What qualities make a good friend? Once a link with another human being is established, what can we expect from this connection? How do friends support or sustain us? And when someone's behavior becomes a source of daily frustration, what is our role?
Heck works valiantly to come up with solutions; the results are, by turns, droll and agonizingly sad. His optimism and ingenuousness earn him true friends even while propelling him deeper and deeper into trouble. Readers will furrow their brows, trying to work out what other choices Heck might have made and whether anything would have made a difference in the end. Ultimately, Heck is a regular kid making the most of real superpowers: honesty, artistic talent, wit, loyalty, cleverness, and a big, big heart.
Emilie Coulter
Book Reviewer
Committee for Children