Tihema Baker

Two best friends from a Wellington boarding school discover they've got some cool new superpowers, and are recruited along with more teenagers worldwide by a secretive organisation of Watchers to be trained to protect the world.

The organisation and its leader is convincingly ambiguous: I was genuinely on the fence about whether the Big Reveal would be that they were the bad guys or that they were the good guys after all. Jason and Rory's developing relationship is also nuanced, their initial tightknit friendship threatened by Rory's jealousy, and the characters of the other Subjects sharply-defined without being caricatures.

I really loved the focus on teamwork and the concept of creating "Fusions" rather than each relying only on their own superpowers; I was only disappointed that there wasn't much of a callback to this, not even an "In the chaos they didn't think of...", when it came time to put their skills to the test for real.… (more)