3.5 stars. There’s a lot to like here: girl power, a not super sexy heroine, and a superhero trying to be normal as a college student. Doreen really wants to do the college thing, including boys, clubs, etc. But she’s not doing it to be normal; she just want to know computer science stuff (that would be her major, although I’m not sure why she chose it). More of this part of her story would be helpful, since a good portion of the book is her super-heroing and those are the parts that have more issues for me. I’m not sure about going to classes though, since the one classroom scene is her sneaking in late and discussing her identity to her roommate who has figured things out after a bank robbery she witnessed stopped by Squirrel Girl and Tippy Toe. Is she even going to open a book? It may not be the most entertaining part of college, but that kind of thing is the actual point of post secondary education. There is also much room for entertainment, like Dorren trying to bring up squirrel stuff in class, or doing her homework with Tippy Toe’s help. For the record, these are scenraios I want to see, not anything that actually happens. Doreen is mostly amusing, but she’s sooo clueless. As a superhero, she misses a lot of criminal activity going on behind her back, and I know it’s her personality, but her optimism gets irritating after a while. Maybe it’s more the optimism plus the clueless that bothers me.
What I didn’t enjoy was how oblivious Doreen is to a lot of the world around her, and how not-believable a lot of her solutions are. Make friends with Galacticus, and maybe he won’t destroy Earth? Talk to Kraven and suddenly he’s more interested in hunting exotic large monsters than Spider-Man? This is not how supervillain types work. Even her ‘borrowing’ a space-suit from Tony Stark doesn’t really fit with what I know about Iron Man. It’s like Squirrel Girl expects the world to think like she does, and the annoying thing is that it sometimes kind of works. Galacticus didn’t quite buy the friends equals no eating Earth, but I’m still not sure where Squirrel Girl convinced him to go instead of Earth. I’m sure I missed something, but I have no idea what or where.
On the other hand, the small print footnotes are pretty amusing. A lot of them are author to reader, which adds interest and distracts to the more annoying qualities of the story. Even if the authors acknowledge the silliness of the story this way, it’s still not quite enough to cover up the problems. Acknowledgement of silliness just can’t override going beyond the limits of suspension of belief.
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