Well, after the heart-wrenching true story of Ashley's War, I felt like I needed a palate cleanser. I thought I'd get back to the roots of the blog, reviewing YA action-adventure, and no one serves up action or adventure better than Marvel. Add to that Margaret Stohl's Black Widow: Forever Red has garnered some buzz on some of the other blogs I visit, and services a character that is criminally underused in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (how did we get Ant-Man before a Black Widow standalone movie?) and I though it might be the cure for what ailed me.
I have to say, it was not.
I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's deeply flawed, to be sure. I'll get to that in a moment. But I think a lot of my disappointment may have been due to my expectations. First off, my view of the Marvel Universe is shaped overwhelmingly by the movie and TV side of it. I've read a few of the comics, but follow the MCU religiously. And some of the other Marvel characters in the book are good approximations of their MCU counterparts. Stohl's Tony Stark is the same wisecracking rogue we've come to know and love, and she especially captures Phil Coulson's deadpan wit. (Side note: Actor Clark Gregg does not get enough credit for turning a bit character in a small independent studio movie into a lynchpin of one of the biggest movie franchises in history).
The one character I found off was Natasha herself. In the movies she's not just an ass-kicking badass, but often has a breezy, sassy air to her and she is perhaps the most empathetic of the Avengers. I found Forever Red's Natasha to be a cold, unfeeling robot for much of the book, and if she feels any emotion it's usually brooding. This might be more true to the comics, I can't say for sure.
The book's fatal flaw, however, is how it handles foreshadowing. There are, in my humble opinion, right ways and wrong ways to handle the foreshadowing of a major character death. Ashley's War did an outstanding job of that, making the foreshadowing so imperceptible at first that you couldn't even put your finger on why you starting feeling this sense of dread. Even within the MCU, there's a good recent example, where the promos for the last few episodes of Season 3 of Agents of SHIELD blared that someone would die, and a flash-forward scene revealed that a necklace would be part of that death. Then in the last two episodes the necklace went from character to character among the show's large cast, always keeping you guessing who it would be. Forever Red goes about this the completely wrong way, telegraphing a death at the end of the book from the very begining (this is done by starting every chapter with excerpts from a SHIELD Line of Duty Death inquiry). As there are only three main characters, and one of them is Black Widow, you have a 50/50 chance of guessing who it will be, and it's not really hard to tell which one of them will bite it in the end. In doing this, the book effectively neuters itself, removing any tension or drama that might otherwise have been present.
The other problem, and this is inherent to all the other standalone MCU movies, is why, if you have a large roster of super-powered friends to call upon in times of need, would you not do that? The book makes the flimsiest of excuses for that, and at one point near the finale, Natasha is even on the phone with Tony Stark, and you can't help but wonder if she's willing to call him for tech support, why wouldn't she just ask him to come over in his invincible flying suit and help her make short work of the Russian and his goons, without needlessly endangering the life of two teenage kids. It's understandable in the movies, they have limited budgets. But in a book, it threatens the suspension of disbelief, even in a universe populated with living Norse gods and giant green rage monsters.
So overall, it kept me entertained, but it failed to meet my high expectations.
-Mike, Out
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