273: Miles Morales: Spider-Man

Synopsis

“Everyone gets mad at hustlers, especially if you’re on the victim side of the hustle. And Miles knew hustling was in his veins.”

Miles Morales is just your average teenager. Dinner every Sunday with his parents, chilling out playing old-school video games with his best friend, Ganke, crushing on brainy, beautiful poet Alicia. He’s even got a scholarship spot at the prestigious Brooklyn Visions Academy. Oh yeah, and he’s Spider Man.

But lately, Miles’s spidey-sense has been on the fritz. When a misunderstanding leads to his suspension from school, Miles begins to question his abilities. After all, his dad and uncle were Brooklyn jack-boys with criminal records. Maybe kids like Miles aren’t meant to be superheroes. Maybe Miles should take his dad’s advice and focus on saving himself.

As Miles tries to get his school life back on track, he can’t shake the vivid nightmares that continue to haunt him. Nor can he avoid the relentless buzz of his spidey-sense every day in history class, amidst his teacher’s lectures on the historical “benefits” of slavery and the modern-day prison system. But after his scholarship is threatened, Miles uncovers a chilling plot, one that puts his friends, his neighborhood, and himself at risk.

It’s time for Miles to suit up.

The Good

🕷️Narration: consumed most of it on audiobook,  the narrator (Guy Lockard) does well with doing young black dude voices

🕷️Not an origin story (as someone who knows Miles Morales this was interesting although I wouldn’t have cared if it was an origin story)

🕷️Add dimensions to the story that some of the comics does not have (because they are written by white men)

🕷️Similar to comic

🕷️Black girl love interest

The Bad

🕷️Loses some of the comics fun

🕷️Lessons/morals (is it too literal?) with villain and stuff

🕷️Did not care for Spider-man parts

The Meh

🕷️More contemporary than sff (which made me angry for a little while)

Questions🕸️

How are hardcore/people who read Miles Morales comics going to feel about it? Who is this for?

Not origin story but doesn’t have the action adventure/Miles Morales-isms I was expecting as a comic reader. Nonetheless, the further I got into it the more I enjoyed it. You have to expect a realistic contemporary with Miles Morales with a pinch of Spider-man.

(Synopsis and  cover are from goodreads)

Blacklist Introduction

This will be a black young adult, middle grade and maybe adult older books theme/review thing.

Why I’m starting this:

• There is not enough talk/reading of black backlist young adult or middle grade novels

A lot of problems come from this lack:

1. Amnesia of black content- content comes out and people forget about it because there are not 99 people talking about it every five minutes
2. Idea of only/first- noticing a lot of books coming out last year and this year being seen as the only or first of their kind. It is messy because most of the time they are not the first ever or even that year.
3. You shouldn’t critique and should be thankful- because x book is the only/first black novel within a certain genre/category.
4. It dismisses – pioneers like Walter Dean Myers and Sharon M. Draper but also erases so many other authors like Tracy West
5. Randomly finding so many black pre-weneeddiversebooks ya that I’ve never heard of in my life.

Criteria:

There is not a lot to my criteria it just has to be pre-2017 particularly published in 80s/90s or early 2000 and be written by a black person.

Black History of Ya

Going to end this post with a link to the black young adult novel I read last year: Reprintable: Promises

(all images from goodreads)