A Schneider Family Award Honor Book for Middle Grade
From Newbery
Medal honoree and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds comes a
hilarious, hopeful, and action-packed middle grade novel about the greatest
young superhero you've never heard of, filled with illustrations by
Raúl the Third!
Portico Reeves's superpower is making sure
all the other superheroes-like his parents and two best friends-stay
super. And safe. Super safe. And he does this all in secret. No one in his
civilian life knows he's actually...Stuntboy!
But his regular
Portico identity is pretty cool, too. He lives in the biggest house on the
block, maybe in the whole city, which basically makes it a castle. His mom calls
where they live an apartment building. But a building with fifty doors just in
the hallways is definitely a castle. And behind those fifty doors live a bunch
of different people who Stuntboy saves all the time. In fact, he's the
only reason the cat, New Name Every Day, has nine lives.
All this is
swell except for Portico's other secret, his not-so-super secret. His
parents are fighting all the time. They're trying to hide it by repeatedly
telling Portico to go check on a neighbor "in the meantime." But
Portico knows "meantime" means his parents are heading into the Mean
Time which means they're about to get into it, and well, Portico's
superhero responsibility is to save them, too-as soon as he figures out
how.
Only, all these secrets give Portico the worry wiggles, the frets,
which his mom calls anxiety. Plus, like all superheroes, Portico has an
arch-nemesis who is determined to prove that there is nothing super about
Portico at all.
