Gentleman's Club: Amazon Exclusive Cover (The Avalon Knight) Paperback – October 8, 2021

I've read a lot of books in my time. I cut my teeth on Lord of the Rings and Dune, which set me up with unrealistically high standards for the rest of my life.Is Gentleman's Club in that same echelon? To be honest... not really. But its not trying to be. And that's good too.Gentleman's Club is a fun, breezy read that feels like its over way too soon and makes you want to read more. Luca is a likable protagonist (even when he's being a brat) that you can't help but root for, fist pump the air when he triumphs and want to give a cookie and a headpat to when things go south for him. The antagonist is one of the best type, the kind you want to see stopped, but you also feel like he has valid points that need addressing.The dialogue is snappy and believable, the fight scenes are punchy and weighty, and at its core it has heart. N T Herrgott is someone who clearly has a lot of love for the superhero genre and though that, Gentleman's Club manages to be a bit of freshness in a genre that, I feel, is growing a bit stale.So if you're in the market for the kind of book you can pick up and get so lost in you're genuinely surprised when its finished and its the next day and oh crap you're going to be late for work, give this one a read. I'll be eagerly awaiting Gentleman's Club 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Interesting story concept. It was just not for me.

I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did, but it is truly a well-written and exciting novel with a hero that constantly informed and entertained me. Crossing my fingers there will be a sequel!

It was a fun read that included a lot of characters you don't normally see in superhero stories. I really enjoyed it.

A really fun read with a great main character, I can't wait to see how the series continues.

I bought because i like the author yet i found myself so surprised by story and writing. I was pulled in to a story that i found impossible to put down after the 1 chapter. I didnt find myself stealing moments to read, i completely redid my schedule to finish this book in four days. I'm already reading a 2nd time.

I loved this book. Luca as a protagonist was so thoroughly enjoyable and Charming. Every moment with him was fun. I love the LGBTQ+ rep in this book. The supporting cast is super fun and memorable. I just wish I had more time to spend in this story with these chars.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I'm a huge fan of James Somerton's YouTube channel, which the author writes for. Plus, who doesn't love a transmasc bisexual superhero? But oh boy, this wasn't great. Spoilers incoming.I did really like Luca. He's got a strong character voice, he's well developed, and he breathes life into a story that's otherwise not great. He doesn't really change or grow at all through out the story, but he's entertaining to read about at least.My major takeaway is that this book desperately needed an editor. The pacing is off, there are dropped plot points all over the place (what happened to the cute boy he made out with at Halloween? I don't know and neither do you. Brandon is never on screen again after that and is only mentioned like twice), information is casually mentioned like it's come up before when it hasn't (the first time the word "cyberpath" is mentioned is when the narration casually mentions that Luca is "starting to buy Hanna's cyberpath theory" about the Gentleman. I assumed I'd missed an earlier conversation, but that's the advantage of getting the Kindle version--there's a search function. And sure enough, that's the first time anyone says anything about cyberpaths), there are weird time skips, important scenes are described to us instead of shown (like when his dad reveals he knew the whole time that Luca was a superhero! We get a couple of paragraphs describing how that conversation went! That should've been major payoff from the father/son dynamic that's been building the whole book! And instead it's just glossed over! WHAT), there are localization issues (this is California, we don't have social insurance numbers here), there are basic technical mistakes (in real life an IP address doesn't even always point to the right city, let alone a specific room in a particular building), and oh my god the ellipses. I almost stopped reading because of the ellipses and dashes alone. They are gratuitous and extremely distracting. Genuinely, if you just took out like 90% of the f***ing ellipses, I would've given this at least two stars.There were also some choice moments that really bothered me. The "hey fellow kids" energy was particularly strong in one moment where "clapemoji" was literally written out in dialog. There's also the time when the tech genius villain claimed that reducing something's value by 20% ten times was "non-Euclidean accounting". Look, either he reduced the remainder by 20% each time (for a total reduction of about 90%) or else it was just impossible. Either way, there is absolutely nothing non-Euclidean about that. Also, we find out that a group of teenagers built a laptop using spare parts they had lying around. I'm sorry, but what?? You can't put the same parts into a laptop as you would into a desktop because sizing and heat management are completely different. How did these teenagers, who otherwise don't seem to be particularly technically minded, happen to have laptop parts lying around?Also, the politics. They're very Tumblr-esque. A main character tells us it's fine if you financially ruin a huge swath of "gentrifiers", losing a job and a house is nbd. After all, "nobody owes a gentrifier's feelings a damn thing". No, let's not have a conversation about the power structures and lack of good policy that led to the gentrification in the first place. This is a story that takes place in San Francisco, but the role of tech companies in gentrification is never mentioned. This is a book where the villain is a hacktivist, but the company we critique is in real estate. Between this and the other glaring technical inaccuracies, my assumption is that the author knows very little about the tech space, despite choosing to write a book with tech as a central motif.The final nail in the coffin for me was when Luca tracked down the Gentleman in the end by using the exact same "plug in the Trojan horse, find the IP address it's sending data to, and go there" technique that's used at least two other times in the book. That made no sense the first time and it makes even less sense that the Gentleman would leave that vulnerability wide open repeatedly.Clearly I could go on. But TL;DR: the protagonist is fun. It's unfortunate that he's trapped in a story that makes very little sense and which should've been about half as long as it is.