Holy mixed feelings batman. Or X-men, in this case, I guess. 

To say I came to this book with high expectations is an understatement. Superheroes? Found family? Queerness? I love all these things so much. I wanted a fun wholesome romp full of cheesy tropes and a bunch of new children to love. And when it does the superhero stuff, Cute Mutants is at its best. The powers these kids inherit are super creative, it's fun to see the tropes played straight and lampshaded all at once, and it brings back the eternal questions of vigilante justice and what that looks like. Dylan's power in particular is just all kinds of incredible. 

It's just.. a lot of the rest fell flat to me. Enough that at 50% I was seriously considering quitting. It's a combo of stuff that just aren't my thing and others that I think could use better execution. For exemple, repeatedly having to witness real-world bigotry, across just about every axis, is not what I expected from this and just really not my jam (especially when the racism comes with some white saviour aftertaste).  I got used to Dylan's narration sounding like the internet, even if the metric-ton of references* often lose me, but it also sadly comes with the non-stop string of ableist slurs, so watch for that.

It also tends to flatten thing,especially characters. You know that thing fandom does where they attribute 1-2 characteristics to a character and that's suddenly all they are? That's what it felt like for Alyse, Emma, and Bianca. Coincidentally the ones that are not love interests, hm. And that's the second thing. Everyone talks about the big found family in this book and like, yeah, the Cute Mutants are all together!! But wow do the friendships feel underdeveloped to me.. except maybe Alyse's? Part of it stems from Dylan's social anxiety (which, top notch on that front), because a lot of the book is spent on Dylan even believing she has friends to begin with. Maybe this gets better in later books. Not sure I'll stick around to find out.

I think that sums up my main gripes. Don't get me wrong, I can easily see where people would fall head over heels for this. I'd probably have loved it more if I had been prepared for how dark it actually is, but the gushing reviews and cute cover forgot that bit. XD I wish I'd loved it more than I ended up doing. Kinda feels like I'm missing something. 


*Including several Harry Potter references, which considering how much "stand up to transphobia" happens in this book, which is self-published, and thus fairly easy to update.. really caught me off guard

This book is "what if a teenage X-Men fan plus a random group of her classmates actually got superpowers", with all the delight and awkwardness that this description implies. The MC is nervous, not good at the whole "friend" thing and really believes that she's responsible to DO something with her newfound powers. The overall effect is earnest and extremely relatable if you've ever been really into some THING that just became weirdly relevant after years of obsession, or if you've ever dreamed about all your random knowledge being useful as more than a curiosity. 

I like how the powers kind of fit their personalities while still not being anything I could predict. It feels like the kind of sideways logic that's emblematic of a superhero origin story without being overdone or trite. It grapples with moral grey areas in a way that's generally fun to read while being appropriately grim when necessary. The characters make a pretty great ensemble, and I like how they work to make their strange powers be effective when at first glance they don't seem very useful (neither singly nor together).

The only thing I didn't like was that the characters in general and the MC in particular had a tendency to use the kind of (usually self-effacing) ableist language that's so ubiquitous that most of us don't realize it's ableist until someone points it out (lame, dumb, etc.). It's a minor quibble in an otherwise fantastic book since the language isn't directed at anyone in an actively ableist way, but it was so frequent that it was distracting for me. I hope the characters learn better soon, but it was frustrating to read something full of ableist language when it could have used other words to convey the MC's low self-esteem.