“Happy birthday, Stanly. We hope you like your present…Cynical, solitary Stanly Bird is a fairly typical teenager – unless you count the fact that his best friend is a talking beagle named Daryl, and that he gained the powers of flight and telekinesis when he turned sixteen. Unfortunately, his rural Welsh home town is not exactly crying out for its very own superhero. London is calling – but what Stanly finds there is a good deal weirder and more terrifying than anything he could have imagined. Perhaps he should have stayed in Wales …"This is one of the most original and funny books I’ve read in a while. Stanly is immensely entertaining with such a clear and distinct voice that it’s hard not to become best friends with him.
The premise of ‘Bitter Sixteen’ sounds unbelievable, and you’d be right, as even in the realms of sci-fi and fantasy, a boy waking up on his sixteenth birthday with superpowers, who already is the owner of a talking beagle called Daryl, sounds daft in the extreme. Here’s where the big ol’ ‘but’ comes in. Stefan Mohamed has created a fantastical situation in a such a realistic environment, that the events that unfold feel plausible and uncontrived.
Counting down to the exact moment he turns sixteen, reflecting on life as a modern teen, (while coping with an enormous migraine) Stanly evaluates his life as extremely…ordinary. Then, as the seconds tick past, he experiences a bolt of white-hot pain, leaving him with an all-over tingle that he can’t explain. Oh yeah…and he’s floating off the ground. From that moment on, ‘ordinary’ flies out the window. As does Stanly on a regular basis.
This is a funny, off-kilter take on the super-hero genre that, for most part, did not take itself too seriously. It has everything; superpowers, a talking dog and as many geek references as I could ever wish for. Stanly’s argumentative internal monologues are hysterical. Age Rating 13+ The main monster is very scary, slenderman with side doses of spider thing.
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