YA Superhero Novels

There is a growing body of work for fans of YA novels dedicated to the superhuman – be they hero, villain or something in-between. This is a list of titles that I have read, enjoyed and can safely recommend as being some of the best of the genre.

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Katie Holmes, aged 17, lives with her adoptive mother, the housekeeper of a fabulous house in Camps Bay belonging to the gorgeous hunk Finn O’Reilly. Finn has the ability to stop time, to move into what is called “untime”. Katie can’t stop time but, uniquely, can function in “untime” and works as a partner, a sidekick, to Finn.
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SteeleartTen years ago, Calamity came. It was a burst in the sky that gave ordinary men and women extraordinary powers. The awed public started calling them Epics. But Epics are no friend of man. With incredible gifts came the desire to rule. And to rule man you must crush his wills.

Nobody fights the Epics… nobody but the Reckoners. A shadow group of ordinary humans, they spend their lives studying Epics, finding their weaknesses, and then assassinating them.

And David wants in. He wants Steelheart – the Epic who is said to be invincible. The Epic who killed David’s father. For years, like the Reckoners, David’s been studying, and planning – and he has something they need. Not an object, but an experience.

He’s seen Steelheart bleed. And he wants revenge.
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firefightThe sequel to Steelheart
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OTHERGIRL-cover-rgb-667x1024Louise and Erica have been best friends since forever. They’re closer than sisters and depend on each other for almost everything. Just one problem: Erica has superpowers.

When Erica isn’t doing loop-the-loops in the sky or burning things with her heat pulse powers, she needs Louise to hold her non-super life together. After all, the girls still have homework, parents and boys to figure out. But being a superhero’s BFF is not easy, especially as trouble has a way of seeking them out. Soon Louise discovers that Erica might be able to survive explosions and fly faster than a speeding bullet, but she can’t win every fight by herself.

Life isn’t a comic book – it’s even crazier than that.

Othergirl is out soon
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herocomSurfing the net during a lightning storm has amazing consequences for a group of teenage friends. Superhero powers are theirs at the click of a mouse! Trouble is, they don’t know what the powers will be until they try them out …

But super powers carry super responsibilities. When a weather-altering, world-conquering supervillain kidnaps their mum, they have to decide: save her …or save the world!
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vicious-book-cover-v-e-schwabVictor and Eli started out as college roommates brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same ambition in each other. A shared interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl with a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the arch-nemeses have set a course for revenge but who will be left alive at the end?
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No Super Hero is complete without a Super Villain to rise against:

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When Jake, the school bully, deliberately infects the school’s IT system with a virus, he starts receiving strange emails. Somebody is inviting him to join them in ‘conquering the world’ and they send him a link to a website: VILLAIN.NET. It only takes a few clicks before Jake finds himself signed up to an entire world of supervillains.
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hivecoverOtto Malpense may only be thirteen years old, but so far he has managed to run the orphanage where he lives, and he has come up with a plan clever enough to trick the most powerful man in the country. He is the perfect candidate to become the world’s next supervillain.

That is why he ends up at H.I.V.E., handpicked to become a member of the incoming class. The students have been kidnapped and brought to a secluded island inside a seemingly active volcano, where the school has resided for decades. All the kids are elite; they are the most athletic, the most technically advanced, and the smartest in the country. Inside the cavernous marble rooms, floodlit hangars, and steel doors, the students are enrolled in Villainy Studies and Stealth and Evasion 101. But what Otto soon comes to realize is that this is a six-year program, and leaving is not an option.

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