Book Review: The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Teresa Toten

A few months back I was blessed with a collection of 3 books after having won a competition with Movellas . Each book shares a young adult/ teen target audience, dealing with specific themes that strictly face reality rather than drawing an affront to it. They also seemed to commonly paint each lead protagonists' persona as being affirmative yet somewhat despondent in how they think and interact with other characters.

The focus of this review is the second book I came upon, The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Teresa Toten. Here, we find Toten create a whimsical tale about a boy named Adam, incensed by a string of problems but benevolent in his attention to others and noble attitude towards vanquishing the evil possessing his one love, Robyn. Adam's view of the world is very much black and white, which is fundamentally characteristic of who he is, making the story effectively more intriguing; it provides the novel with something that makes us want to sympathise with Adam when he comes into trouble with his OCD on a number of occasions.

I found Toten's ability to develop characters through the omniscient voice much more effective than I'd hoped, especially in how she used this style to create a distinctive voice for a young boy (Adam) with an abstract mind and peculiar perspective on growing up and finding his feet in this strange world of his. Many times I found my mind falling back into rhythm with the narrative voice, similarly found in 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime'. It is indeed a novel designed to uphold the verisimilitude of real issues and the nature of the human condition. The hopes thrown into the characters' elevated status' through how they select superhero identities gives them a reverential prowess that is light-hearted and truly especial.

However, the plot in general was fairly dry. In all fairness, my expectations were probably set too high, where I waited to be stunned by some alluring action sequence or fantastical event dispelling the glum reality we face in our day to day lives. But this just isn't the novel needed to bring such. In all honesty, it is a fantastically constructed novel, but one that is mightily ordinary in everything that is explored.

My verdict?

Read when: you're looking for something light to read, drawing on realism
Don't read if: you're looking for something to leave you in a fit of emotions or you're just looking for a swampingly majestic read full of magic, mystery, suspense and lots and lots of intrigue