Sovereign
April Daniels
314 pages
published in 2017
Trans superhero takes on the evil plans of a thinly disguised Peter Thiel and a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist “superhero”; if that doesn’t make you want to read this novel you can skip the rest of this review.
Sovereign is the direct sequel to Dreadnought. Danielle “Danny” Tozer was a trans girl who got her ideal body when she inherited the powers of the world’s greatest superhero, Dreadnought, because she was the closest person near him when he got killed. Though she got her greatest wish, her problems only started as she had to not only deal with the villain that killed the previous Dreadnought, but also a skeptical superhero community reluctant to support a trans Dreadnought as well as her own family, actively hostile against her transition. In the course of the previous book the villain got defeated, but her other problems remained.
When Sovereign starts, Danny has to deal with the fallout of a transphobic superhero exposing her identity to her parents. They’re now in a federal witness protection programme and she no longer lives with them, is in fact embroiled in a legal battle to get emancipated as a minor. Meanwhile the local superhero team, the Legion Pacifica was almost destroyed, with only Doc Impossible and the aforementioned transphobic superhero Graywytch remaining, the latter continue to refuse Danny membership. And now GrayWwytch has teamed up with that Peter Thiel lookalike…
Like in the previous novel, Danny’s problems cannot be solved by simply punching harder. Even as a superhero she has to deal with the same transphobic bullshit other trans people have to deal with, all the while dealing with a legacy that means she has to do that in full public view, with little to no privacy. Things do not go well for Danny, both privately and as a superhero for most of the story. She gets a happy ending of sorts, but she has to work hard for it. A good dose of angst always works well in a superhero story for me and Danny’s angst is more relatable than most, grounded in the very real problems of many trans people, of dealing with coming out, of transitioning, of dealing with hostile family or work environment. Some of the things she has to deal with here are of course more fantastical. At one point she gets kidnapped and tortured at length, which was hard to read through.
On the plus side, Danny is no longer alone. There’s Doc Impossible, who allowed her to move into her flat and functions as a mother figure for Danny. She been almost the only person in the Legion Pacifica to show sympathy to Danny and her role as an adult confidant means Danny now hasa support network to fall back on. More importantly there’s also Calamity, the grey cape vigelante from the first book who took Danny under her wings after the Legion rejected her. Slowly but steadily these two move from friends to girlfriends throught the course of Sovereign, though not without hiccups on the way.
Regarding the title, it’s indeed two notions of sovereignity that are pitted against each other. The first one is the obvious one, of the Peter Thiel clone’s desire to rule and remake the world in his image, as well as Graywytch’s desire to do the same. These two are allies of convience and ultimately their notions of sovereignity have no room for anybody else’s. Contrast this with Danny’s fight for emancipation, her desire to be responsible for herself without having to validate anybody else’s notions of who she should be. It’s a much more positive idea of being sovereign, but that first notion of sovereignity leaves no room for it.
So in good superhero tradition it needs to be slugged out. Like the previous books, the superhero fights in Sovereign are top notch. It’s hard to create a believable, exciting fight in prose but April Daniels manage to do so multiple time. Danny has to work to win her fights and that makes her all the more sympathetic. Dreadnought might be a Superman expy but Danny is very much her own character, who you want to be happy. The villains she fights against might’ve seemed over the top even two years ago, but considering how over the top real world villains have become…
Sovereign is a worthy sequel to Dreadnought and I’m hoping to see more of Danny in future installments.
