Fallout by Gwenda Bond

Lois Lane is starting a new life in Metropolis. An Army brat, Lois has lived all over—and seen all kinds of things. (Some of them defy explanation, like the near-disaster she witnessed in Kansas in the middle of one night.) But now her family is putting down roots in the big city, and Lois is determined to fit in. Stay quiet. Fly straight. As soon as she steps into her new high school, though, she can see it won’t be that easy. A group known as the Warheads is making life miserable for another girl at school. They’re messing with her mind, somehow, via the high-tech immersive videogame they all play. Not cool. Armed with her wit and her new snazzy job as a reporter, Lois has her sights set on solving this mystery. But sometimes it’s all a bit much. Thank goodness for her maybe-more-than-a friend, a guy she knows only by his screenname, SmallvilleGuy. 

So, Superman is not my favourite hero but I am all about the superheroes at the moment and I am especially interested in Superman's not-so-secret partner Lois Lane's past. I don't know much about Superman's backstory apart from what I can vaguely remember from watching Smallville and I know even less about Lois's so seeing her as a high school student and a budding reporter was really cool.

This is just the latest in a long list of high school Lois has been to so she's not expecting anything amazing to make Metropolis seem any more special. Until she has a run-in with the Warheads, a creepy group of uniformed teens who finish each other's sentences and play way too much video games. Lois and her father saw something unexplainable years ago so she's aware of the strange possibilities, so when mind-melding and mild telepathy was apparently used, she didn't shrug it off as impossible. Which is lucky because some students are getting terrorised by the group, having their heads messed with, both literally and metaphorically. And if there's one thing Lois doesn't like, its bullies.

I really enjoyed this, I was excited to learn more about Lois Lane and her growing up; it was her first reporter job, she's making her mark and getting the hang of fighting bad guys in all their shapes and forms. Plus the online-only friendship she has with SmallvilleGuy was adorable and teasing and, of course, full of little in-jokes about who he really is but he can't tell Lois. All in all, a funny and clever modernisation of the Superman story with Lois Lane in centre stage, quite rightly.

Published 10th March 2016 by Curious Fox. Thank you to the publisher for my copy in exchange for an honest review.