The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man [Hardcover]

I have two children, ages 5 and 11 who were very excited to see Awesome Man arrive in the mail. We are big fans of super hero literature and movies, so this was something to look forward to. The cover alone had my 5 year old extremely excited, and she could not wait to read the book. And so, we began to read. Let me start with the positives of this book, because the illustrator deserves a huge shout out for the terrific job he did bringing the story to life. The artwork is absolutely amazing, and without it, the book would have been even less interesting to my children than it was. Jake Parker chose the ideal color scheme for this super hero story, and the retro feel to the pictures was superb. He captures the super hero and the villains perfectly in this book. If you went back through the book and only looked at only the pictures, you could create your own detailed story from start to finish. His pictures are truly worthy of 5 stars. [As a side note, there is one thing that did bother me about quality of the pictures, and I am guessing it is due to the printing of the book and not the illustrator himself. There were several pages in my copy of the book that almost looked grainy, and the crispness of the artwork almost looked as though they had taken clip art, blown it up, and lost some of the clarity in the process. It was not true throughout the book, so it would be interesting to know why some of pages did not look quite as clear as others.]

The actual story itself was not quite as inspiring to me or my children. To start, Moskowitz the Awesome Dog is featured prominently on the cover of the book, yet other than bringing a snack to Awesome Man, there was no story line involving the dog that lead me to believe there was anything awesome about him. He is a faithful sidekick to our super hero, but that is the extent of the story line for the dog. My 11 year old wondered out loud why there wasn't more written about the dog. It was as though the dog was placed on the front cover of the book to lure in children who love dogs, in hopes of hearing about some exciting adventure he might take, or read about some super power he might possess. The story itself was pretty predictable, and we had figured out about halfway through the story what the "big secret identity" was going to turn out to be, so the story lacked the suspense we had expected. There was very little character development about the villains, which was a real shame, because a character like Professor Von Evil had a lot of potential. A short three page spread made me wonder how he even made it into the book. My 5 year old got bored before the book was over, and the story never had that, "I wonder what will happen next" feel that a super hero book usually elicits in my house. For as much potential as the title and illustrations had, the story itself was flat and disjointed. I did go back and re-read the story wondering if I had missed something on the first pass, but unfortunately, the story was no more exciting the second time around, and the kids decided this was not even close to being a favorite book. If you want to read a great book about a child who dreams big and has fantastic artwork, I would recommend Chris Van Dusen's If I Built a Car. The story is quite engaging, and it captures a child's imagination much better than Awesome Man. I do hope that we get to see more of Jake Parker's work in future children's books because I think he has a gift for capturing the feel of children's literature.

My son loves superhero movies/stories so I thought this would be great for him. I was rather disappointed after reading it with him today.

I liked the retro comic book feel of the book, but the story is terrible. Awesome Man basically lists all his superpowers then fights random bad guys who show up out of nowhere. Some positive messages but they get lost. Very aimless in that regard when even a simple plot would've been easy to devise and much more engaging. There's also nothing to appeal to little girls with this book. Unless you're already a fan of Chabon/Parker, skip this book. Good premise, poor execution.

Decent illustrations but come on -- kids deserve a good story too.

I did not like anything about this book, the story was lackluster, the illustrations were unpleasant to look at and I felt like this was another one of those books...

You all know what I'm referring to...those books that grab your attention because the author has written something else that was great and now they've published something that isn't but because of the great book the book that isn't great will be able to sell a ton of copies before anyone really notices that the not at all great book isn't great.

I hate when that happens...