Brave Men Run by Matthew Wayne Selznick

When I started listening to podcast novels, or podiobooks, I asked Chad for some recommendations. He immediately suggested Brave Men Run, by Matthew Wayne Selznick. He told me it was kind of a superhero origin story, combined with a coming of age story for an outcast high-schooler. The coming of age part didn't really grab me; I was the outcast in high school, and don't enjoy rehashing those memories. But I love superhero stories, so into the iPod it went. I queued it up when I went camping a couple weeks ago, listening to it on the long drives to and from the state park. As often happens with good podcasts, I barely noticed the trip go by. I was drawn into the story quickly in the first episode. It also made an excellent companion piece to watching Heroes, as a different take on similar subject matter. Brave Men Run is a novel of the Sovereign Era, Selznick's alternate history where people with superhuman powers and abilities, Sovereigns, he calls them, emerged in the 1980s and changed the course of human destiny. It follows Nate Charter, a teenage outcast with an appearance and abilities that set him apart from everyone in his high school. When William Donner comes forward to display his vast powers and declare that everyone like him is "sovereign," Nate finds himself on a quest to discover his origins and find out who he really is. Brave Men Run works on so many levels. For me, setting it in the 80s was the perfect way to get me into the mindset where I was really able to empathize with the characters. I was in high school in the late 80s, and I remember all the little elements he used, song lyrics, descriptions of fashion trends, slang, and the like, did take me back there. But rather than relive my own dark memories, I got to listen to Nate as things started going right for him for the first time ever. The use of the first-person narrative was ideal; I doubt the story would have worked near as well told any other way. And Selznick's voice carried the story perfectly. He made Nate sound like a guy about my age, recounting his high school years and the events that changed his life back in the day. It gave it a more intimate story-telling feel than other audiobooks and podcast fiction I've heard. To top it all off, it's a damn good story about the origin of people with superhuman powers. That's one of my favorite kind of stories. I like to read comic series from the very beginning to see how the heroes started out, I love the various origin-story reimaginings we see in the various comic-inspired movies, and I definitely don't miss an episode of Heroes. And like Heroes, we don't see people suddenly don spandex and run about fighting crime. We're treated instead to a kid who just wants to live an ordinary life, but is thrust into the midst of the most extraordinary of circumstances. He's got to learn who he is, what he can do, and who he can count on. If you haven't checked it out in one of its various formats, I highly recommend Brave Men Run. As an aside, I had the pleasure of meeting Matthew Wayne Selznick at a party at Dragon*Con. Chad enjoyed embarrassing me to no end by telling him he had been trying to get me to listen to the novel for months, and I hadn't yet done so.  It was queued up in my iPod at the time along with at least two others Chad had been telling me I needed to read. :)