"ae" and sometimes "ä": June 2026

Sunday, June 21, 2026

Review: Starter Villain

Starter Villain by John Scalzi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Charlie has lost almost everything: his career is gone with newspapers amidst corporate takeovers and the internet and Google taking up all the ad space. He came back to his hometown to look after his father. All he has left is his father's house, his cat, one suit, two ties, and a sense of humor.

And, oh, how I enjoyed this book. I loved the interplay between characters, the snappy conversations, and Charlie's very middle class American point of view. He keeps plugging away, with a dream to restart his life. Then his essentially unknown billionaire uncle dies and he discovers there really are supervillains. Charlie is everyone who is hanging on to the vanishing middle class as billionaire robber barons assemble monopolies and fire workers who think a union might get them a living wage.

Charlie's struggle is real, and then his life becomes chaos, which is every bit as funny and action-packed and relatable as The Kaiju Preservation Society.

Library copy because the minimum wage has been held down in spite of reason, productivity, inflation, soaring housing costs, and soaring corporate profits. Support the strikers!

View all my reviews