Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen

Please Don't Tell My Parents #3

by Richard Roberts, Emily Woo Zeller (Narrator)

What would middle school be like if half your classmates had super powers? It's time for Penny Akk to find out. Her latest (failed) attempt to become a superhero has inspired the rest of the kids in her school to reveal their own powers. Now, all of her relationships are changing. She has a not-at-all-secret admirer, who wants to be Penny's partner almost as much as she wants to be Penny's rival. The meanest girl in school has gained super powers and lost her mind. Can Penny help her find a better one? Can she help an aging supervillain connect with his daughter, and mend the broken hearts of two of the most powerful people in the world? And in all this, where will she find time for her own supervillainous fun, or even more dangerous, to start dating? It's going to be a long, strange semester.

Genres: Superheroes, Young Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Middle Grade, Audiobook

Audio CD

First published February 8, 2016

About the author

I've been writing for a long, long time. A long, long, long time. Do you remember when dirt was invented? I was using it to scratch out stories. Getting published was harder, but now I'm hooked up with Curiosity Quills and I have real books in paper, and you should buy some!

As a writer my fascination has always been children's literature, especially children's lit that is also adult lit. For some reason, this means that instead I write gothic light romance for fun, and very dark and tragic young adult books for passion. I love seeing the world through the eyes of strange people, and I believe that happy endings must be earned the hard way. There's a reason my friends started calling me Frankensteinbeck.

I could talk about how great my writing is until I turn blue, but I should let an expert do that for me. Check out the Kirkus Review for Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth!

http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-rev...

Reviews

[Yzabel Ginsberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

[I received a copy of this book from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.]

I have been following this series from its first volume, which I really liked, so I'll admit to being slightly biased. I like the main characters, the world of superheroes and villains developed here—everybody knows they exist, with more or less admiration and acceptance of what they do, and with a subverted Masquerade trope (supers don't hide per se, but there's an unspoken rule about “not getting personal”, that is, not revealing people's day-to-day identities).

And I'm feeling torn, because I liked this third volume, yet also found it kind of weak in terms of plot. Perhaps because it's more focused on a part of Penny et al.'s life we hadn't really seen yet, that is, growing up, and finding out that dividing one's life between villainous activities, trying to become a hero, and just good old norma activities, is time-consuming and difficult.

In that regard, it was interesting. Other kids are making their coming out, refusing to hide their powers any longer, and a wind of acceptance is blowing over the school. The club activities, the new lair, those were both fun to read about, and also leading to more thoughtful considerations.

I quite liked Marcia's development, although I wish we had been given some more information about how exactly she turned out like that (“she has the scrolls” is a bit of a shortcut: how did she survive them?). Her powers are of a kind that I find fascinating, that is, would you stay sane if nothing could hurt you, or not for long? Or would you start experimenting, looking for the one thing that may do you harm? It made me think of Claire's experiments at the beginning of the “Heroes” series, only in a more.. unhealthy way. But then, I much prefer this Marcia to theuppity girl from book 1.

Quite a few things that left me frustrated, though:

- This is really more a “slice of life” book, without any real plot apart from the loose “teenagers gathering and developing their powers”. As mentioned above, it allowed to delve deeper into our three wannabe-heroes (or wannabe-villains?) problems and potential choices for the future, and to reveal more about existing characters, like Bull and his family. On the other hand, there was no real main plot here, ideas would spring up and unfurl into short events that would then die down, and good plot devices were lost in the middle. What about the robot? (Having her around more would've been fun... and I think we could do with a new Vera by now.) What exactly happened to Barbara to make her another kind of unpredictable, but perhaps still as dangerous as her sister? Also, we're having many secondary characters introduced (the club) and this is screen time may have been better used on the Inscrutable Machine (who didn't do enough villainy to my liking—I want to see them dostuff back together more often!).

- Still no real insight as to Ray's family, which makes his position hard to relate to: it seems his parents would hate him if they were to learn he's a super, and so he both wants to stay and to leave... but that's only what we're told. We never get to see his family. We don't know what they're like. Regular people, from what I rememberfrom book 1... or not so much? Are they heroes or villains in disguise? Or maybe people who got badly hurt in the past by some hero or villain, and now they despise everything “super”? I really, really want to know, and I really hope there's more to Ray's folks than the little we'vebeen told so far. It can't be so simple. And if it has to be “that bad”, then I want to see it, too.

- Are the Akks so blind as to their daughter's activities? Or are they pretending not to know? Deluding themselves? By now, this is more than troublesome. Maybe Penny's father might get away with this (scientist more focused on his own inventions, and all that), but it's difficult to keep seeing the Audit as this calculating, probabilities- and statistics-wielding ex-hero, as this sort of human computer, when she's so oblivious to what's so obvious. The “bumbling blind adult” trope isn't working.

Honestly, I don't like giving less than 3 stars to this book. But...

Nevertheless, this novel raises some interesting questions and potential future arcs at the end, and I'd still want to see those in a next installment, if it meant more antics from the trio. Among other things: what is the Inscrutable Machine to do, to choose, considering that they seem to be really talented at villainous stuff (with the good deeds backfiring), yet still find themselves instinctively helping people as well as causing mayhem? And what is Spider up to?

[C.T. Phipps · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Don't Tell My Parents series is one I am deeply enamoured of. It's on my list along with Ex-Heroes, Wearing the Cape, and Confessions of a D-List Supervillain for some of the best superhero fiction out there (along with my Supervillainy Saga of course). The books are neither dark or especially deep but they're fun.

The premise for the series as a whole is Penny Akk, daughter of superheroes Brainy Akk and the Audit, has discovered her superpowers at puberty (age 13). This results in her attempting to become a superhero but accidentally getting herself branded as a supervillain. With her friends Ray and Claire, both getting superpowers from her science experiments, she becomes the leader of the Inscrutable Machine, the world's youngest supervillain team.

This episode picks up after the rather lackluster Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon and returns to the more interesting environment of Los Angeles. The story opens with Penny trying for a second time to become a superhero, only to get herself busted as her parents justifiably don't want her endangering herself at such a young age.

The focus of this episode is less on the Inscrutable Machine building a army of henchmen than the slow transformation of their school into a West Coast version of Professor Xavier's Westchester Academy. It seems every other student was hiding powers of one sort or another and this leads them to forming a fanclub to see how they could develop their abilities to fight (or commit crime). All around the newly-outed-as-a-superhuman-but-not-as-a-supervillain Penny.

Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen is a significant improvement over its predecessor and has a lot more of the fun, whimsical style I came to love in the original book. It also doesn't have much of a plot as compared to the previous book, which is both a blessing as well as a curse. This is mostly a series of vignettes about Penny and her life, following her group as they try to figure out what they're going to do with their abilities.

This entry in the series moves from silly adventure to silly adventure with getting a supervillain to reconcile with his family, a field trip to supervillain-filled Chinatown, and dealing with a Lara Croft-esque adventurer trying to break into an old tomb. There's also a nice little storyline about poor Generic Girl trying to deal with the fact she doesn't want to be a superhero but feels like she's obligated to use her powers for good.

There's some interesting story developments in the aforementioned Generic Girl, Marcia, and the relationships among the main cast. However, the book suffers a bit from not having a real focus to build the story around. In the first book, it was the Inscrutable Machine accepting they were supervillains. In the second book, it was the larger plot with the steampunk Jupiter colonists. Here? There's not much going on.

There's some definitely entertaining bits, don't get me wrong. I also like the addition of a LGBT character to the main cast. I also like the new character of Bull who is one of the world's most experienced supervillains but a man who has decided to retire to teach kids. I am eager to see where things go from there. I do hope the next volume has a little higher stakes, though, especially as the cast grows older.

Despite this, I very much enjoyed this book and am looking forward to the next installment of the series. The Inscrutable Machine remains the most likable supervillains you're going to find in a Young Adult series. I don't foresee that as changing. Richard Roberts has an amazing talent for creating engaging whimsical characters who manage to be cute without being saccharine. Penelope Akk is the Princess of Adolescent Supervillainy. *puts a five in the Princess jar*

8.5/10

[Coyora Dokusho · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was glorious!!!! Glorious!!!! (I woke up at 1 am to start reading it - my alarm went off at midnight but then I slapped it... but my dreaming self was excited enough about the book to wake me up about 45 minutes later!! I then passed out again about 5 am or so, and managed to finish before I scraped myself out of bed and dragged myself to work... which was horrible... horrrrrrrible!!!! XD)

I feel like it was definitely a bridge book leading to new! and exciting! developments in the future but it was awesome enough reading about it right then as well. What happened at the end made me want to read the whole thing over again to see if I could pick up *clues*... As always the characters and plot are engaging and funny and I'm left dying for the next book....

[Sean Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished the book last night. It was like eating a sugary snack. I loved it all throughout, and then afterwards, I felt vaguely dissatisfied. The book seemed to lack focus. A lot of new characters popping up and days and weeks just kind of passing by... the latter actually kind of makes sense in retrospect since part of the plot of the book is how, as you grow up, outside responsibilities leave you less time to just hang around with your friends. But the new characters... take, for example, the illicit archaeologist who just sort of shows up in the museum, gets introduced, gets an explanation of who she is, and then completely vanishes after Mourning Dove shows up. I felt a bit the same way with Bull's extended family. They felt like the author has character sheets from an RPG campaign and he wanted to make sure that he got all of the character notes into the book despite them being there and gone.

I dd like the hints that Penny's power is maturing such as when she builds the puzzle cube without blacking out, or even being really aware that she's building something super-sciencey. And Ray's family situation shows that there are some things that neither love nor super-powers can fix. The Audit still not picking up on who Penny is is odd with my bet being on a willful disregarding of facts due to confirmation bias and the disinterest in the chaos caused by the kids dipping into supervillainy is also really weird... you'd think they'd at least have someone looking into the crime scenes. I know there's some ambiguity about whether to treat kid supervillains as adults or kids from the whole Inscrutable Machine fiasco, but it feels like they went from seriously considering it to completely ignoring it.

Overall, it's a good book. But, like the second book, it fails to clear the bar that the first book raised.

[Laura Cunha · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://leiturasdelaura.blogspot.com/...

Esse é o terceiro livro da série do Richard Roberts "Please don't tell my parents", confesso que estava com saudades da Penny e já fazia tempo demais entre um livro e outro da série para uma leitura "saudável".

Na verdade, acho que deixei passar um pouco desse tempo. Li o último volume em 2015, fazendo um pouco mais de 3 anos entre um livro e outro, o equivalente a um pouco mais de 200 livros entre um volume e outro da série. Não foi uma boa ideia. Confesso que fiquei bastante perdida com diversos personagens secundários.

Claro que os personagens principais e a vilã mais carismática eu lembro bem e adorei revê-los, em compensação, os inúmeros personagens secundários entre os colegas de escola, mocinhos e vilões, ficou tudo uma grande confusão. Eu não lembrava nem do nome, nem dos poderes e nem do que tinha acontecido com eles. E a leitura de "Por favor não conte para os meus que eu tenho capangas" (em tradução livre minha) sofreu bastante com isso.

As histórias do Richard Roberts são absurdamente fofas, mas a escrita não é das melhores, tendendo a ser confusa. Some-se a isso o fato de que eu não lembrava quem era quem e você percebe a minha dificuldade em aproveitar plenamente a leitura.

Apesar dos problemas (meus e do autor), a leitura é divertida e Penny é irresistivelmente fofa. Tanto que já emendei com o quarto livro da série! (Não vou cometer o mesmo erro de novo). Nada como ler personagens crianças que realmente são crianças! Eu queria muito que o livro estivesse traduzido para o português... acho que seria um sucesso.

[Fangs for the Fantasy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penny’s career as a supervillain is in jeopardy with parental interference – but there’s a more complex battle happening at school. More and more of Penny’s contemporaries are deciding to be open with their super powers. A club is formed – and of course Penny is picked to lead it

But this points to a whole cultural shift for the city as people are now wearing their powers openly, the more alien super-powered beings are now able to be join the community and it comes with a whole lot of more complex questions: like who these kids want to be and what it actually means to be a super powered being



This book seems to be covering a lot more serious issues than the previous two – it has grown up a bit from the previous incarnations of the story.

When Penny started to gather a huge fanclub following of fellow superhero kids at school, I wondered if the Infernal Machine was going to become an army.

But, it was deeper than that. It instead used all of these kids to ask a lot of difficult questions and broaden the world beyond being just a zany setting of hilarious, almost comical superhero/villain fights

Like what goes into the choice of whether to become a superhero or a supervillain? Which do these kids want to be? Why? It may seem simple but then we see Marcia, poor, tortured, ill Marcia who speaks out of the perfection and repression that comes with heroism. We see kids who have powers that aren’t pretty and just don’t fit neatly into hero themes – including heroes rejecting their superpowered kids because their powers are “thematically” wrong

And what about those kids who do have super powers that just don’t lend themselves to combat? Not ever super power is actually an ideal battle ability. Nor is every altered form ideal for fighting – the kid who looks like they’re made of living glass may be intimidating and kind of awesome, but they’re also waaay too brittle to be involved in combat. In between the super powered fighting, the kids learning to use their powers, the kids all learning the rules of the world they’re in there’s a lot of looking at what it really means to be a super powered kid.


There’s those kids whose powers change their appearance – how many of them have to be home schooled because they’re considered to be too alien to actually be part of the community? How many kids dye their hair or cover their skin to hide some non-human feature? And, as the super power club grows, how much does the culture change that more and more of them stop hiding

Yes, there’s a hefty analogy there. And I’d be much much happier about this hefty, not-subtle analogy if the single LGBT character in this story wasn’t revealed petty much in the epilogue. There isn’t any representation here, which is more than a little annoying (there is a pair of “heterosexual life partners who aren’t lesbian honest”… and I have no idea what is even being attempted here. Just no).

On top of all this we also have the question of super powered people who don’t WANT to fight. Who can actually see a way to use their super powers to the greater benefit of all that doesn’t involve battling other super powered people. Which also comes with the touching story of Claudia, her family and her own struggle with being both immensely powerful, able to help so many – but not WANTING to be a hero.

Claudia is also a recurring POC in the book and it’s a nice touch to see her story expanded beyond what we’ve seen so far. The gathering of super hero kids also has several POC characters among them. But I still hate Chinatown – whyyy do we have the villainous area of the city be China town? Especially since there are no actual Chinese people in this Chinatown! The name is redundant.

We do have two disabled characters – two mentally ill characters in the form of Marcia and Abigail. I’m leery about both of them. Both see them using medication and dealing with their illnesses in different ways. But at the same time they are also depicted as dangerous, unstable and a threat – which is such a common trope.

Of course this all returns to our three heroes, Penny, Claire and Ray and the question – what do they want? This touches back to the eternal question hero vs villain but also goes far more as they work on solo identities and examine their own motivations


Read More

[Eric Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is more like 2.5 stars, rather than 3.

While better than the second book, it just wasn't quite as good as the first book. Again, this book is more a collection of things that happen, than an actual story. But the boring and out of place space setting is gone, and all of the boring characters that went with it, so that's a plus. Mostly, the problems I had with this book is that it's rather poorly written, which makes it very confusing in places. The author introduces a very large cast of supporting characters in this book, and he never really describes them very well, so he constantly uses names, but gives no features, personality traits, individual ways of speaking, or anything that would help you to remember which name goes to which character. I was constantly asking myself, "Wait... who was Barbara again?" "Hold on, which one was Marsha?" I shouldn't have to do that. Each character should have some memorable trait to go along with their name so readers can tell them apart, but none of them really did. And the author has this annoying habit of starting scenes or conversations in the middle, without giving any sort of context. Because of this, there were probably ten to twelve times in the book where I was asking myself, "What the hell is going on? Did my Kindle flip two pages at once?" It didn't. It was just bad writing.

So yeah, it's still harmless fun. And while it's an improvement on the second book, it's still not as good as the first, which is the only book so far in this series to have an actual storyline in it.

[Derya Erisdottir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny and full of empathy as always. And don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the much more personal plots. Especially Penny/Ray and Penny/Cassie were very well-written teenage relationships, and Bull + Claudia was great development as well.

But it missed a proper hero/villain plot! I wanted the Inscrutable Machine in action, and I didn't get it. Kai sad!!!

[Matthew Rubenstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, now this is what the series is about! I think there's so many good things in this book, closing a lot of loops and expanding upon the universe we know. In so many series, you're going to consistently see new characters added and retconned in, but here we really get a sense that the universe is coalescing, with characters from the first and second books coming back into play in a familiar way. And the superpowered kids club is just the perfect portrayal, imo, of what a superpowered world would look like. I think we see a lot of portrayals of perfect heroes, and antiheroes, and villains with villainous backstories -- we forget that, well, if superpowers existed, those that wield them would be human too, would have their own childhood. And in a society where superpowers aren't abnormal, they'd have to find their own path, and determine morality on their own. Plus, fun mad science! And yet again, great character growth from Ray, from all three of them. And love the portrayal of their classmates too, especially the major ones -- Claudia, Cassie, and Marcia. It's great, realistic (for a book about superheroes) growth that keeps the series contained.

[Greg Farnum · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Henchmen" returns us to the world of superpowered Penny Akk. It is significantly better than previous novel "Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon", and thankfully returns us to the Los Angeles setting with her school and parents. The storyline is a lot more comprehensible than I remember Moon’s being, but there also isn’t the forward thrust that was present in "Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a Supervillain" — it’s a series of events in Penny’s life that are enjoyable to read about in the moment but don’t do much to push her character or her friends forward (some relationships evolve, and secondary characters undergo interesting changes, but nothing is *done* with those changes!) — a big contrast with Penny's acquisition of powers, subsequent rollercoaster, and final assertion of her place in the world in the initial novel.

Oh, and it needs another pass from a good type editor. But it’s still fun to read and a significant improvement from the second book.

[Strina K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked a lot of things, but weirdly, my favorite might be Marcia's character arc? It was just such a nice surprise that she even *got* a character arc! She spent two books as Classic Mean Girl (Now with Bonus Combat Action!!) and then she got all interesting! That never happens. I also adored every single thing about Bull and his family's story. He is such a good dad! I need to know so much about Irene! Oh, oh, also Cassie's *everything*. Awkward teenage bisexuals who just want to superhero battle their crush = my eternal delight, more forever, I would like a whole book please.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teen super villain Penny Akk has bested adult heroes and villains, been to Jupiter, and caused a super hero to start heroing just to stop her. She’s super successful at villainy. But it isn’t what she wants. When she takes up a classmate’s challenge in an attempt to solidify herself as a hero she fails but opens the doors for her classmates to reveal their own powers. Suddenly it seems that every super powered kid wants to join the club Penny and her friends started to cover for their Inscrutable Machine activities or fight her, sometimes both. With a ton of kids suddenly looking up to here, a wanna be rival sparking for a fight, and a relationship building it’s going to be an odd semester.

Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’ve Got Henchmen returns to the familiar world a super hero inhabited Earth and to the closer setting of the characters’ middle school. This works massively to the book’s advantage though as it gives a good basis for the characters to know each other and interact, putting the new characters on a solid footing right from the start. It also brings things back to the level of Penny worrying about her parents discovering her secret identity while trying to work out a way to ditch Bad Penny for good.

That’s a bit of a double sided thing here. It feels in a lot of ways like the Audit, Penny’s mom and retired hero, is either willfully deluding herself or not nearly as perceptive as she’s meant to be. But it’s still fun to see Penny interacting more with her parents again after not seeing them for most of the last book. Plus it sort of feeds into this family aspect that’s started off early on with the Inscrutable Machine being called on to help convince a retired villain to rejoin his family and be the father he wants to be.

A lot of things sort of echo down in this one and let the reader in on more of Penny figuring out who she wants to be. Her parents forbid super activity early on, leading to her also being unable to do things as Bad Penny, which slows things down a little. It also gives us this fun space for development though. We see Clair getting more into her cat burglar thing, following in her mother’s footsteps, and Ray is working out what he wants to do with himself and his powers.

There’s also this fantastic thing with the other super powered kids, they want what it seems like Penny has. They want to be able to practice with their powers and not to have to hide them. So, suddenly the club that our protagonists started to hide their super villainous exploits is full of all these kids who have seen what they’ve done and want to learn. That gives us room for all these scenes with these characters first seeing things like the Chinatown super villain weekends or even just meeting some of the various supers for the first time. It’s a nice reminder of how awestruck Clair and Ray were back in the first book as well as being a cool way to introduce some of these new characters’ personalities and abilities.

That said, there are a few weird characterization moments where it sort of feels like this one character wasn’t meant to be antagonistic but then part way through just sort of remembered that she really didn’t like Penny. It’s a little jarring. There was also this bit towards the beginning regarding super villains Rage and Ruin’s relationship that felt super awkward and unnecessary, it didn’t add anything or do much for the scene.

Those bits were really the only things that took away from my enjoyment of the book though. I really enjoyed the new characters and want to see more done with them in future books. And it left me excited to see what’s going to happen next. So, that earns Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’ve Got Henchmen with a four out of five.

The publisher provided a copy of this novel for honest review.

[Douglas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This author pretty consistently doesn't explain story points and includes at least one monumentally stupid thing in his books. In this book a classmate of the main character gains super strength through reading a couple of martial arts scrolls. How she got the scrolls when every martial artist in the world was looking for them we are not told. How she able to use both scrolls when any individual is only suppose to be able use one we are not told. Why she then beat up her own father we are not told. And this is a major story line. The girl in question goes from a junior high mean girl to a psycho thrill seeker over night and walks around in public with these scrolls tucked into her belt which leads to a martial artist attacking her for them.

On the stupid side the book has a retired villain taking a bunch of 13 year-olds on a field trip to super villain central WITHOUT ANY OTHER CHAPERONES. The author does a good job of making it seem reasonable for the super villain to be present BUT THEN JUST IGNORES THE FACT THAT SEVERAL OF THE PARENTS AND AT LEAST ONE REGULAR SCHOOL EMPLOYEE WOULD NORMALLY BE PRESENT AS ADDITIONAL CHAPERONES. AND THE AUTHOR DOES THIS AFTER HAVING A WHOLE SCENE IN THE PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE AFTER A FIGHT AT A FOOTBALL GAME WHERE THE ONLY POINT IS HOW INSANELY PROTECTIVE THE PARENTS ARE. Of course that isn't stupid enough. The author then has the sole chaperone wander off and of course psycho girl gets attacked for the scrolls and cursed items are bought, etc. But still not stupid enough. The person who attacked the 13 year-old for the scroll is caught. Is he dealt with later, LIKE ABSOLUTELY ANYONE WOULD DO????? No. He is brought in front of the head villain at the same time as a class of 13 year-olds and sentenced to death in front of them. The head villain is a super genius and yet she can't figure out how to not take care of the attacker except to do it in front of a bunch of kids????? BUT WAIT, IT GETS WORSE. Knowing the attacker was legitimately sentenced to death, knowing the attacker was a super villain who's killed before and would again and knowing that the attacker had just thrown away his entire life in an attempt to get the scrolls her classmate still has, THE MAIN CHARACTER STILL SETS HIM FREE. Even more bizarrely, that is the last we hear of him?????????? None of this makes sense and none of it adds to the story. Absolutely everything about psycho girl and the field trip could be dropped from this book and it would be half as long and twice as good.

Fortunately the rest of the book was pretty enjoyable but the whole book is just a filler. We are being told about the main character's life and things happen but nothing really significant. In book 1 of this series (ignoring the prequel) the main character gets super powers and through circumstances beyond her control is identified as a super villain instead of hero. In book two she goes into space and deals with 3 threatening alien species and multiple previously unknown human colonies. Here, the main character becomes founds and presides over a school club, goes on a date, learns what her best friends want from the future, wrangles one of her own creation that gets out of control and collects a couple of magic items for use in the next book. Truthfully the book was, other than the field trip bullshit, fun enough that I was able to enjoy it. But given the relative pointlessness of the book I have to ask why was it written, let alone published?

Bottom line: only worth reading if you are otherwise really enjoying the main character of this series.

[Bonnie Dale Keck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kindle Unlimited

The roomie says 4 or better, but these books are so not for the supposed young adult target age nor for older readers, at all, and this one is too much like 90210 teen angst crap as well as silly stupid. Also so many typos and whatever that my reader was stuttering like Mel Tillis, and there was all sorts of real name, made up name, super name, and other confusions, that made it the worse of the 4, so far {just one more to go}.

I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence! (Please Don't Tell My Parents Book 4) {more like .5/prequel} {Amazon shows it as book 4, so Amazon shows 2 book 4's}
Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain 1
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up the Moon 2
Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen 3
Please Don't Tell My Parents I Have A Nemesis 4

[Baroness Ekat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this book, it returned back to Earth and dealing with being a teenager having superpowers and not wanting your parents to know you are the head of a middle school supervillain team.

It got back to the feel of the first book and we get to see Penny coping with her skills, her desire to be a superhero when her powers are more villainous AND dealing with the fact that all the other super powered kids in her school are coming out into the open and wanting to be part of her afterschool club.

I am interested to see where the series progresses and has been one that I am recommending to both adult and child friends.

[Ruby Ridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

The series continues to get worse, this book was so unfocused it was really hard to read.
Penny was just not Penny, the romance was unnecessary and pathetic, I just could not get into her character.
Ray is becoming a more ridiculous character as the series progresses - write him out, the series would have been better if he had not been involved at all.
Clair - I'm just confused.
The kiss at the end could lead to an interesting plot but I guess the author will ruin it like he has with the rest of the series
I will read the next purely to see where the late development leads - reluctantly

[Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad at all. A lot of different characters/villians/heroes of the child variety were introduced on this one. Almost to the point where I just stopped remember who is who. With that number of folks just running about there was no way a deus ex machina moment wouldn't just pop out when the Inscrutable Machine got into a pickle. I still overall enjoyed this story enough to continue with the series.

[Scott Wozniak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This middle book in the series was entirely character driven. Unlike the first two books, there was not grand adventure, big mystery or doomsday to stop. But there was a ton of character development, and not just for the main character. Plus, in the process of meeting new characters and seeing them grow, we got to see a lot more of the super-world of this series. So there was plenty of interesting moments and I still enjoyed reading. It was just less intense and exciting as the first two.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished 4/18. This book is adorable...though I am getting a little tired of some of the characters, which for me usually means they stopped growing. Hopefully it’ll pick up in the next one. I’d like to know more about Claudia. And if some of the other creatures come back from their other books...

[Alice Aro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the author wrote three awesome kids and then decided, fuck it, all the other kids would be as soul-suckingly annoying as possible. I swear if adults didn't exist in this book I wouldn't consider reading the rest of the series.

[Nav · Rating 4 out of 5]

The misunderstanding about her secret identity and villain status continues to be a bit of a strained contrivance, but I still really, really liked this. This book suffers a bit on the interesting/exciting scale for focusing on Penny's school life.

[Donny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked the return of story-telling from where we were in book 2. This book is more like a Slice-of-Life that happens to be in a world with super powers. I like where this novel left the characters for the next in the series.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this one nearly as much as the first. While in many ways having less plot than "I blew up the Moon", I found it much more engaging.

[Bram Slaats · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the oops I did it wrong approach to being a superhero. can't wait for the fourth book.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

These books are a delight. Penny is a treat, and this book had a lot of fun involving her classmates coming into their own. I can't wait to start the next one.

[R.S. Jinks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this series. If it deals with super powers I am there. A great entry. I would be happy as a pig in mud if this series went on forever.

[Daniel Woodward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun loving look at villians,even if they don't want to be. Good for all ages,and a fine adventure story recommend this series to superhero fans and just everyday readers alike.

[Michele Koning · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gg

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Yeah I guess I just have to work tomorrow
Yeah yeah I’m sure you can do something like that

[Ta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again a top hitter. Fun, cool, interesting, take a pick of flattering adjectives.

[David Strong · Rating 2 out of 5]

My rating: 2.5 stars.