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This is the third book in the Wearing the Cape series, and I quite enjoyed it.

Unlike the first two books, this one have multiple narrators, changing each chapter. It does say in the header of the chapter who's narrating, but it took me a long, somewhat confusing time to notice that.

Each of the three narrators does have a fairly distinct voice, which I appreciated once I knew them well enough to recognize them. By the end of the book I honestly liked Grendel a lot better than Hope/Astra. I think perhaps Megaton was at least partially an attempt to recapture the innocence of the new-to-superpowers-and-super-heroing that Hope had in the first book, but the circumstances were too radically different.

On the surface there are three main plots: 1 - Hope becomes the leader of her own "Young Sentinels" team. According the The Rules, because these kids are all under 18, they are strictly not allowed to be sent into combat.
2 - A forest is trying for a hostile takeover of all the city's airports 3 - Someone is going around killing people who attack superheroes, regardless of how dangerous the attack was.

I really, really liked most of the Young Sentinels team, and didn't dislike any of them. Grendel was a breath of fresh air, and Ozma is a delight both on her own and as a foil.

However, I had a number of issues with it, some of which are unique to this book and some of which only became issues in this book because of a cumulative effect from previous books.

On the cumulative side, in this book I really started to notice how frequently The Rules were strictly, absolutely enforced...except when it would be inconvenient or undramatic. Also, Astra apparently has a secret super power that allows her to fit an impossible and ever-increasing number of work-related activities into her day, and still spend time with her friends and family (although admittedly that's often cut short). And the anti-super demagogue is an increasingly present issue that doesn't look like he'll be going away. Plus it starts to feel like there's a checklist to mark off for each book.

But when I finished the book, my first words were, "Hope's annual crush had BETTER not come to anything because that is just super skeevy."

This book starts with Astra's hero reputation trashed because of tabloid rumors, and even her friends suggesting that since it's been months, maybe it's time to stop wearing mourning black. The police chief suddenly hates her for no obvious reason. Plus there's someone running for office whose platform is all fearmongering against all super-powered individuals, especially those who wear masks to preserve their civilian life, like Astra does.

In other words, that intense, heart-wringing grief at the end of book one? Time jump so the author doesn't have to actually follow up on it, which would be understandable if they wanted to return everything to normal, but we don't get to go back to the generally optimistic feel of the first book either.

That said, there's still a lot of funny conversations and narrator observations. They carried me through a plot that could be summarized as "the world has gone to pot, and also here: have a Chicago Mob war. With superpowers."

(I loved the "BTW we're lesbian lovers" scene so much I read the entire thing out loud to my spouse, and we were both laughing like crazy.)

Officially, Astra is still part of Chicago Sentinels hero team. But since she doesn't confide in them until she has to, and she does a lot of stuff without authorization, it's really more of a solo adventure with a couple of friends helping out. And she's constantly berating herself for not having planned thoroughly enough, and yet she still keeps on going off half-cocked. It's kind of tedious.

To start with, this book has a serious tragic ending, one that normally would make me just give up on the series. However, the rest of the book was good enough that I did keep reading.

I quite liked the main character, Hope Corrigan aka Astra. The story is told in first person from her point of view, and she's a generally positive person. She makes rookie mistakes, but her team, her family, and her friends all support her and encourage her. At the start her parents are understandably worried about her becoming a superhero since it's a dangerous profession, but admit that they raised her to take responsibility, and in this case that does mean doing whatever she can to help.

And she's not the only one making mistakes and improving -- her team does it too as they're called on to deal with types of events they've never trained for. In general it's actually a pretty relentlessly positive book, despite the high body count among the general populace. Some of that is independent of her, but some is directly due to her influence. For example, after a fight with her one hero realizes that he's gotten too dark & jaded, and tries to reclaim some of his youthful idealism. And after another fight, she convinces a bad guy to get some help for his problems. Independent of her, multiple supervillains pitch in to help however they can after a massive disaster, and at least one - the one she worked with, of course - winds up becoming a hero.

One nice thing about this series is that, while there's certainly plenty of super-powered fighting, the team is actually built around Crisis Aid & Intervention. They might (and do) subdue supervillains who are posing a danger to the populace, but once the bad guy is subdued it's someone in law enforcement who takes them away.

I liked the relatively slow build of the romance. It did escalate pretty abruptly towards the end of the book, but there were extremely valid reasons for emotions to be running high. The power differential bothered me a little (he was a full-fledged hero, she was still technically a sidekick), but she was the one making all the moves, and he was the one interjecting caution and common sense. The age gap did bother me since it exceeded the "age /2 + 7" skeeviness rule, but since there's emphatically no sex, and there was a catalyzing event, I was okay with it and willing to see where it went in the next book, once the adrenaline wore off.

But the ending... several important characters, people she's actively friends with and we've seen a lot of in the book, die. Completely dead, not coming back. The book ends with her grieving, and crying in the arms of her church's priest. (She's Catholic, it comes up regularly.)