StreetSlam: Wishes of a Broken Time by Leon Langford

[Edit: Originally published July 30, 2016]

Hold onto your seat belts because this book is a wild ride from start to finish.

Devin Maxwell joins Titan Force after his mother is killed by a menacing green beast. His goal? Bring her back to life.

Simple story, pretty cliche, right?

Cliche yes, simple no. The plot is much more intricate than I expected. You’ve got the green energy monster responsible for the death of Devin’s mother, you’ve got a man planning to use a young girl to cause insurmountable death and destruction, you’ve got a rogue agent with an unclear agenda, and that’s not even everything. It can be a bit confusing, but it works out.

However, not every plot piece is tied up at the end, in fact, the book leaves you with more questions than get answered. There’s a reason, it seems, that the cover of the book declares it to be “Volume One.”

StreetSlam is action packed to the point of rollercoaster and I love it. Where does the fight scene take place? Literally everywhere, also I think you mean fight scenes. Palatial mansion, on the open highway, a mall. The real question is where doesn’t a fight take place. The one thing I’ll say is that the fight scenes can get long. The fight scenes strike me as very anime in their style, they’re the kind of fight scenes you might find in an anime/manga like Naruto and the weapons like something out of Final Fantasy 7.

As much as I loved the fight scenes, my favorite parts of the book were the characters. They were so amazingly developed and diverse. I mean, just take a glance at the cover to get an idea. It’s a stellar cast of characters and I promise you’ll come out with at least three characters that you adore.

Issues and warnings:

There was an issue of women getting killed off (or presumably killed off) to further male character development/provide angst for the protag.
There are some minor inconstancies. Such as a characters hair color sometimes being brown and sometimes being blond. It’s not a huge thing, but it can throw you out of the text a bit.
Typos. There’s not an enormous amount, but it’s definitely more than just one or two things. Sometimes it took rereading a sentence a time or too, but it was nothing that threw me too terribly out of the story.
There were a few instances of fatphobia coming from various characters.
Animal injury. There’s a shapeshifter bad guy who turns into animals, he gets his ass kicked.
Violence of a level pretty typically for a fight driven action packed book. Descriptions of blood and injury, but nothing I’d call over the top gore.

Despite the issues that popped up while reading I really enjoyed this book. It was very fun. It was definitely tropey and cliche at parts, but that was just part of the fun honestly. Sometimes you just need something fun and tropey and StreetSlam delivers.

@blackexcellence101

You can find the book here.

Related Reviews: The Valhalla series.

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