The She-Hulk Diaries!

Gasp in shock, The She-Hulk Diaries are structured like a diary! A touch off putting at first but it quickly became fun and gave a wonderful voice to the character of Jenifer Walters. Another shock here, the book can almost be said to be about her instead of She-Hulk, and frankly I gave it tremendous points for this. We get to see plenty of superheroes saving the world and beating up super villains (and never fear, this book has that too!) but rarely do we get such insight into their alter egos and day to day lives, and what better medium to get inside a character’s head than a novel?

She-Hulk Diaries doesn’t read like a comic book or even a comic book turned novel, but rather a science fiction romance with superhero elements, for which I give it points. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not, fully embracing its medium and there is a drastic need for more sci-fi romance out there! And yes, I said it reads like a romance because that’s pretty much what it is, and that’s not a bad thing. She-Hulk is a female superhero and I applaud taking Jenifer Walters to a realm most male comic book authors are unwilling to travel.

As said before, this book is more about Jenifer Walters than She-Hulk, which makes sense as they treat each other as separate entities. This plays in the book’s favor because Jenifer is such a wonderful character as portrayed by Marta Acosta and is incredibly relatable as a character. More impressive still is that Acosta portrayed her as both emotional AND intelligent, a balance that’s hard to strike for most but which made the character incredibly believable and likeable. Never once did I have a moment where I found myself thinking in the back of my mind “well that was dumb.”

Unfortunately I can’t bring myself to feel that way about the plot. While the characters with few exceptions were very well done, I have a hard time getting behind the portrayal of the villain (whom I won’t reveal because that’s part of the climax.) However, his motivation and rational don’t add up to me and there were several threads that if rewoven could have made for a more nefarious plot. So SPOILER ALERT (Kind of?) the villain’s whole motivation is to marry She-Hulk, and he fully expects to do this after monologueing to her about how he’s responsible for the death of children. And that’s after seeing her horror at the situation before realizing he was responsible.   

Sadly, this isn’t the only cliché of the book. There’s an obligatory bar fight at the beginning for no apparent reason other than to show that Jenifer can throw down too and a few things that feel like they’re thrown in just because. Like a random invisible car that drives itself. It’s awesome, but I don’t get why she needed it. Frequent references to Bruce Banner and Tony Stark are also made, and while I get that Ironman is Marvel’s money maker right now, the character did not play enough of a role in the story to warrant as much page-time as he received.

The last two things however are what bothered me most. I can say this without chance of spoilage because it plays absolutely no role, but the ending comes with She-Hulk/Jenifer deciding to get her dual personalities in order and recognize each as a part of herself. Great. Why is that a problem? Because there’s absolutely zero buildup towards this conclusion. Yes she sees a shrink throughout and their relationship progresses wonderfully, but never once in the entire book does Jenifer (or “Shulky”) pause and think that they need to integrate their personalities.  The result is that this decision comes completely out of left field and leaves me with a weird aftertaste of “happily ever after.”

My biggest issue with the series was that I bought it on the Nook. Acosta details her dialogue and text messages in a script like fashion that gave my device trouble and cut off if it went over the edge of the page without continuing onto the next one. I didn’t miss anything important, but it was incredibly annoying. Especially since some of her dialogue is so enjoyable. Somebody dropped the ball during the production phase and I cannot help but recommend reading this hardcopy or on some other device until they get that fixed. 

On the whole, I'd say this is good light reading and recomend it to lovers of sci-fi romance or people interested in a light but smart read worth some good laughs.