A Schneider Family Award Honor Book for Middle Grade
From Newbery Medal honoree and #1 New York Times bestselling author
Jason Reynolds comes a hilarious, hopeful, and action-packed middle
grade novel about the greatest young superhero you've never heard of,
filled with illustrations by Raúl the Third!
Portico Reeves's superpower is making sure all the other
superheroes--like his parents and two best friends--stay super. And
safe. Super safe. And he does this all in secret. No one in his civilian
life knows he's actually...Stuntboy!
But his regular Portico identity is pretty cool, too. He lives in the
biggest house on the block, maybe in the whole city, which basically
makes it a castle. His mom calls where they live an apartment building.
But a building with fifty doors just in the hallways is definitely a
castle. And behind those fifty doors live a bunch of different people
who Stuntboy saves all the time. In fact, he's the only reason the cat,
New Name Every Day, has nine lives.
All this is swell except for Portico's other secret, his not-so-super
secret. His parents are fighting all the time. They're trying to hide
it by repeatedly telling Portico to go check on a neighbor "in the
meantime." But Portico knows "meantime" means his parents are heading
into the Mean Time which means they're about to get into it, and well,
Portico's superhero responsibility is to save them, too--as soon as he
figures out how.
Only, all these secrets give Portico the worry wiggles, the frets, which
his mom calls anxiety. Plus, like all superheroes, Portico has an
arch-nemesis who is determined to prove that there is nothing super
about Portico at all.
