The premise of this book alone has had me looking forward to it for years now. I mean, it's about a gay teen superhero. What could go wrong? 
 Apparently quite a few things. 
 But I'll start on the positive. The book is written in a play-by-play style that might appeal to younger readers who don't need a lot of detail to enjoy a story. I also genuinely enjoyed some of the minor characters - with Ruth and Scarlett really coming across as some of the more interesting parts of the entire novel. The book might also be trying to use the appeal of the comic book genre itself within its narrative, where action is a little over the top and you're just meant to roll with it. If that sounds great to you then good! This book might be just up your alley. Give it a shot. 
 Unfortunately this is also what drew me out of the novel to a great degree. The benefit of having a comic is being able to see everything as it happens, and Hero doesn't make up for the loss of that when transferring the idea into prose. Next to nothing is physically described - ever - throughout the entire story. It gets to the point where background characters spend time reacting to the presence of costumes without the reader ever being told what they actually look like, and this lack of any visual cue happens on a great number of occasions. On a similar note, often an important detail about a character (ie, having a tail, or being wreathed in flame) will just randomly be dropped into the middle of an action scene without anything to hint that it existed before that moment, leaving you to stop and mentally alter everything that had been happening up to that point all over again. 
 The world building is also poor. The narrative is eager to rattle off names of faux superheroes despite the fact that the names mean nothing without context and don't substitute for actually learning how the world works. The heroes themselves are direct and intentional knock offs of pre-existing characters, right down to their powers and backstories, just with slightly altered names. I'm willing to concede that the references might be interesting to some, but I couldn't help but find this almost lazy when there was so much potential to be creative here. It would have been more understandable if they were just cameos or reference characters, but as they were critical to the storyline in a number of ways I really felt like they deserved to be more than pale imitations (especially when, with one character in particular, all reactions to her presence read as largely misogynistic). On the subject of world building it was also largely disappointing that almost everyone in this world was incredibly homophobic right from the off - and yes, this was supposed to build tension with the idea of having a gay superhero, but there's never any rationale behind it other than blind hated, it never really pays off or presents a solid counterpoint, and I refuse to accept that this was a thing that had never happened before in the world before now. Quite a few sub-plots receive this same treatment; they're built up as important but then flit by without any real resolution on why they happened in the first place. 
 All in all Hero was enjoyable in places, and while I had quite a few issues with the writing style these same things might be seen as bonuses for other readers. If anything I hope this book helps spark a trend of more LGBT superhero novels being written that deal with these issues a lot better.