I have had the thriftbooks listing for Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work for a Supervillain open on my laptop for over a year at this point and have just now realized that I lack any intention of paying for a copy of the book.
This is great segue into the Please Don’t Tell My Parents series, a middle-grade fiction series about Los Angeles except there are superpowers. These superpowers vary widely in scaling, have no apparent rhyme or reason, and have limited impact on society at large. They’re fun too.
The protagonist of the main series1 is a middle-schooler named Penny and is a genius inventor who sometimes builds bombs not quite on purpose2 but generally goes around and wrecks minor havoc, battles other middle-school superheroes, and occasionally gets mixed up in the adult supers lives as well.
The book where they go to space is really weird and little spooky.
The last book of the series is a stand-out entry where Penny needs to duel herself (she created copies of herself which may or may not have gone on to replace her (this is an interesting dilemma)). I wish I could sufficiently explain why this is brilliant, but you really need to read the series to understand.
Also notable is I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence! which is set in the same universe as a prequel. This is a book that I picked up not realizing that it was a prequel, and I felt deja vu throughout the entire story because the characters felt like they were familiar. They were. Afterwards, I felt very dumb.
One final story about this series: I first listened to the beginning of the series on audiobook from the public library right after I finished Wearing the Cape (another fantastic superhero series, free with Kindle Unlimited). When I finished book two, I found out that the other books had disappeared from the library catalog. After sending an email to the library, they informed me that the contracts for a ton of superhero (and other) audiobooks had expired that week, and that the books likely wouldn’t be returning.
After that I immediately found where the print books were located and walked the 3.5 miles to Kings Park Library where they were located, checked them out and then walked back for a round trip of almost eight miles. You can see my commentary at the time below:
