Review: Beta (The Apex Cycle) by M.T. Zimny

Blurb:

Samantha Havardson is not an Apex. She’s completely ordinary with a totally normal family that just happens to moving to the Apex epicenter of the world- the manmade island city of New Delos. Although she thinks her lack of super Apex abilities will keep her out of the limelight, it quickly becomes apparent that the city has different plans, sweeping Samantha up in a world of secret identities and super powers where anyone, even those closest to her, might be an Apex. Plagued by missing students, secret Apex teams, and a mysterious man named Adrestus, Samantha searches for answers, causing secrets to unravel about her classmates, her family, and herself that drag her deeper into the secret world of the Apex.

Review:

Beta was among the books I chose while reading the 300 first chapters of the SPFBO 9 competition. I chose these books for my TBR purely on the first chapters, disregarding what I might know about them from the blurbs or subgenres. 

That said, it was clear from that first chapter this was going to be a YA novel due to the MC being school-aged, and I don’t particularly like YA novels. As it happens, this is also a superhero sort of novel, which I also don’t particularly like. Had I read the blurb, I wouldn’t have picked it up. That said, I’m glad I did. This was a fun time and I really enjoyed it from start to finish. 

The first chapter that initially got my attention did so by being engaging, to the point, a little humorous, and dropped the perfect amount of hints/foreshadowing/signals. All of those things pointed to a book designed to pull me along, and I wasn’t wrong. 

I might have still been a bit on the fence about this one, but there was a sarcastic line in the chapter that reminded me of my mother, and well, it won me over fully. 

I read this via audiobook, and the narrator was a perfect fit for the MC, which is always cool. 

Everything felt well-paced and well-plotted. There were no slow sections and it was really just fun to get into the new school setting with the new roommate and new friends before diving into the real meat of the story with the Apex characters. None of the conflicts or issues felt trivial or forced. All around this was just impressively tight writing.

It had a real old-school urban comic book feel combined with modern YA novel depth and character development. I mentioned I don’t like superhero books, but I do like the old school superhero comics, and this managed to capture that aesthetic perfectly.

For me, this was a rather cozy read since I just don’t visit this subgenre often, but I’d comp its coziness levels to Percy Jackson. I do think that sort of nostalgic comic book atmosphere made me enjoy it a lot more than novels like Percy Jackson though. 

By the end of the book, the stakes were impressively high, the twists really got me, and I’m definitely looking forward to the rest of the series. 

Read Jordans’s review of Beta (The Apex Cycle) by M.T. Zimny