2007-11-21 It's a road movie!

Okay, the villain is not up to much and is hardly a threat to the world but that's okay because we don't meet him till the end. This book is focused entirely on the X-Men which is why I enjoyed it so much; an easy romp, quick to read and full of insights into the classic characters. The twist is that the X-Men are trapped in human bodies so anyone expecting super-heroics should look elsewhere. The trapped X-men find out what it is like to live as human and it's like going on a road trip through America with friends. The author's descriptions of the train journeys and the small American towns are lovely and the X-Men are notoriously bad at keeping a low profile, disturbing the local populace whenever possible.

Aside from the characters in Amazon's review, we also have a fully powered Gambit, Jubilee and Storm at the mansion, but they use their mutant abilities only once in confrontation. Still, all the characters are very well understood by the author and it's the psychological details that keep the book alive, their hopes, desires and frustrations. Jubilee is only in a small part of the novel but she stands out as being one of the toughest of the team and is the first to realise not all is well in the mansion.

The villains in this book are badly written and one-dimensional, particularly the people whose bodies the X-Men have taken over. The fact that they all end up comatose is testament to the fact that very little work had been put into developing them as characters in their own right. At one point Cyclops wonders if the X-Men are prone to developing the mental illnesses that were once part of the human bodies they now inhabit, but that interesting thought was not developed any further and a potentially exciting twist in the tale was ignored.

The character insights of the heroes are what makes this book enjoyable, for example Logan's observation that "Rogue was one of the finest women he knew, but she could hold on to guilt like it was a second superpower" is spot on.