Justice by Jennifer Harlow (Galilee Falls Trilogy #1)
Superhero Romance
May 2013

Reviewed by May

Favorite quote:

I’m sitting here, head up high, stoic, representing their family when I really feel like screaming at the top of my lungs, but I can’t even cry. I’m the strong one, forged by fire and ice.

Twenty years ago Jo was a girl on a bridge, wanting to end it all and entirely without hope. When Justin pulled up, just a kid himself, he didn’t just save her from giving up on life – he became her best friend. Now Justin is engaged to the perfect woman, and Jo is fighting her grief over losing the one man she’s ever loved while also working her job as a detective. A villain escapes from a maximum security prison, Justice (a superhero she loathes) keeps coming around, and she’s balancing a secret new romance with her boss. In other words, Jo’s life has never been so full.

Justice is the first in a trilogy, and keeping that in mind, as well as understanding that this is more urban fantasy (with superheroes) vs romance helped me enjoy this book. Based on the cover I expected dark and gritty and this delivered.

I think that the author gave a nod to a lot of classic superhero tropes such as making it obvious to the reader who the masked man is, and I think she did a good job balancing out what the usual superhero story rules are with her own unique take on the genre. She made sure not to hold back on what the bad guys do, though almost all of the bad stuff happens off the page and we just see the end result. This was no villain who would kidnap and threaten his victims – he’d rape, torture, and kill them. It does tie into my problem of telling vs showing (more on that in a minute) that so much action takes place off the page. That said, being a first person story and because our heroine is a detective and not a superhero I did not expect a lot of superhero battles and such to be shown.

The biggest battle for our heroine is the unrequited love Jo has for her best friend Justin. This is well handled in my mind because it is unrequited. It could have gone into a seriously bad love triangle zone, but the author skillfully steered around that potential pothole.

Oh, Justin loves Jo but not in a romantic way. Jo is coming to terms with this at last and she is working to move past that for the first time with her boss and current lover Harry. A rather bland guy, Harry is almost too good because he is understanding and supportive and emotionally available for Jo in the dark times as well as the light. I did not see a specific reason why Harry was so good for Jo, and given that this is a trilogy and a dark one at that – I’m not committed to him as the love interest.

The big problem for me in this book is I felt like I was being told versus shown things entirely too much. As a reader it is far more engaging to really get a sense of the scene and think “oh this must be breaking her…” than for the character to say “this just broke me”. Also, there are a number of instances where things are done I believe to further the plot but they didn’t quite sync up for me. For example we are told Jo hates all superheroes because her dad died, but we were never really shown how it was a hero’s fault, or why she would hold onto that childish sentiment for twenty years.

Had I been shown a bit more instead of told, perhaps it would have flowed better and been more believable for me overall. Certainly for a book of this length, there was room to really let me crawl inside Jo’s head and understand, feel, and get myself to conclusions without having them pointed out like road signs. Despite being told in the first person, Jo felt very distant and I often questioned her because of this.

Jo is the kind of person you want to root for though. She’s very much alone and has been struggling for so many years. She needs to branch out, to see that there are a lot of people in her life besides Justin and that her attachment to him at this point is holding her back from developing any healthy romantic relationships. She never puts herself first, she’s always thinking of others, her job, how she can best serve her community. So despite not having any special powers, Jo is very much a superhero kind of woman and I loved this about her.

Everything else I might want to say about the book ventures into spoiler territory, so I will just say that I found this to be an excellent and engaging read, and I was really impressed with it overall.

I always have a hard time recommending a book that isn’t a stand-alone until the series is finished because I don’t know where we are heading, I am not sure if I myself will like the outcome. For the price (amazon prime members can even borrow this book free), and because it truly is a well done and unique book, I do recommend checking out Justice. This will be a trilogy, and I hope that there may be some happiness ahead, but I do expect a very dark road getting there.

Grade: B+

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