The main characters, and most of the supporting cast, are interesting enough to keep the ball rolling nicely. Jet, in particular, and her mentor, Night, manage to deliver, not always but most of the time. The idea of Shadow Powers always eventually going mad due to the nature of their abilities, knowing what is in the living dark, etc., is laden with promise, and creepy as blood on velvet. Also in the tick column is the revelation that the world of Black and White is anything but black and white. There are brainwashed superheroes, Everyman -- a popular organisation which regards the super-powered as abominations, plus the insidious specter of sponsorship; quite literally heroes for hire. Less interesting was the feeble display of imagination that produced a shady corporation named Corp-Co, a cadre of superheroes named the Squadron, a superhero training college called the Academy, and out of nowhere, a vigilante called Taser. I was also underwhelmed by the catch-all descriptions of superheroes as extra-humans, and super villains as rabids. To me, extra-human sounded like there was a spare, and rabid is what becomes of people bitten by mad dogs. Much better were the subtle undercurrents of control exerted at the Academy, manipulation of students by various means including overt brainwashing, and the depiction of unrelenting indoctrination whereby all powered individuals are bent to the will of Corp-Co. The book leaps chapter by chapter not only between the perspectives of Jet and Iridium, but also in time. Dramatic tension is often broken by a chapter which takes the reader back to the girls past. Some of these back flash episodes work well, others do not. In particular a scene which felt to me as if it had been levered in to display Political Correctness by featuring two gay superheroes. One of which, disappointingly, was not the character called Hornblower!

Kessler and Kittredge gave me some of what I hoped to be reading when I picked up this book, but also left me slightly frustrated. It is a very readable novel, and more often than not it's fun. My overall impression was that the target audience is mid-teen to early twenties, and, if that is correct, then it does its job. However, there are plenty of comic book fans out there, younger and older, who crave something more sophisticated, darker and deeper. Black and White was a glimpse into a world that has the potential to deliver just that, if the authors so choose. But at this early stage I felt separated from it by a glossy veneer, something closer to the simplistic past of the comic book genre than it was to the complex multiple layers of today.