Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities is a parody of super-hero comics and books and movies. In Copperplate City, Captain Stupendous is a fact of life, a very helpful and convenient fact of life. He’s the reason there haven’t been any abductions in Copperplate City in the last twenty-some odd years.
Captain Stupendous always, always shows up whenever any Super-Villain tries to take over the world or wreak havoc in the streets. And as president of the real Captain Stupendous Fan Club, Vincent Wu is the person who knows more about Captain Stupendous than anyone else in Copperplate City.

Several things annoyed me about this tale of a geeky super-hero fan club and the super hero they are sworn to adulate:

First of all, the boys in the fan club and other characters in the book have a tendency to YELL A LOT, INDICATED BY DIALOG WRITTEN IN ALL-CAPS. This typographical convention is not something I want to encourage in the writing and publishing of children’s books.

Secondly, there is a fair amount of barfing and burping and farting and freaking and sucking going on in the pages of this super-hero obsessed story, and since I’m not an eleven year old boy I could have done without all of that nonsense. I mean, you know, the book didn’t totally suck or make me barf or freak me out. It just felt as if the author said to himself, “Boys like to talk about barfing and farting, so I’ll put lots of that in here.” Yuck.

Third, I found the boys in the story–Vincent , Max, and George–just generally annoying. They picked at each other a lot, and I hear enough of that around my house with three teenagers in the family. Putdowns and insults ceased to make me laugh long ago. And Polly, the main girl character, wasn’t much better. She’s very concerned that the boys all realize that she knows karate and can kick bu– with the best of them. Again yuck.

Maybe it just wasn’t the right time, or I wasn’t in the right mood for the geeky, slangy kind of humor.

I liked the Oxford comma in the title.