Kindle Edition Amazon Amazon Category:  Fantasy Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing ISBN-10:  1945502606 Type: Fiction Pages: 302 Copyright: February 28, 2017 ISBN-13: 9781945502606 Price: $2.99 (eBook) What if you could take make believe and make it real? It’s the summer of 1988 and little is normal about Will and Sandra, except for the name of their town, Normal, Illinois. The two precocious eight-year-olds share overactive imaginations, a love of baseball and genuine affection for each other. But over the course of a single, fateful week at the beginning of their summer vacation the duo discovers budding superhero powers. Each day is a new adventure and an excuse for them to get on their bikes and enjoy being kids. Down the street from where they live is a spooky old house. An elderly woman and her older brother live there along with an overly protective dog that barks at the kids, frightening them as they pass by the house on their bikes. Children in the neighborhood believe the old lady is actually a witch and the old house is haunted. And there’s a rumor that she keeps kids locked in her basement. Sandra helps Will overcome his lack of confidence. Will convinces Sandra to stand up to her mother and become what she wants to be. Together, the kids use a map/maze that Sandra created to explore their imaginations, taking a detour through a fantastic world where they serve as fairy royalty. But when reality rudely intrudes on their idyllic world, Will and Sandra unlock their true potential as a crime fighting team when they are forced to save the day from two dangerous men. Excerpt In 1986, when I was six, there was an unfortunate accident on the school playground involving a pretty girl named Judy, a bully fifth grader named Jake, and a teeter-totter that hit me in the chin causing me to bite off the tip of my tongue. After lots of blood, seventy-three stitches, and a couple of years with a school speech therapist, I still talked with a lisp. Even before that, I never was all that talkative. But afterward, only family and my few friends, those who were used to my difficulty, seemed able to understand me without me repeating everything I said. Dad, whose given name is Irving—Irv for short—was born and raised on a family farm near Normal, Illinois. Yeah, there really is a place called that. When he graduated from high school, Papaw insisted he go to college to learn everything there was to know about agriculture. So, he attended Illinois State University, which was just on the other side of town from where he grew up. Somewhere along the way, Dad decided to study business administration instead of agriculture. Also, around the beginning of his junior year at college, Dad met my mom. Mom, whose name is Eloise—though she cringes whenever anyone calls her that—was anything but a farm girl. Sometimes Dad calls her “big city,” because technically she’s from Chicago—at least she was born there. In truth, she grew-up in the suburbs on the northwest side of the city. Her parents, my Gram and Gramps, always call her Ellie. Dad and everyone else apart from us kids call her Lois. Dad used to tell my sisters and me crazy stories about mom. Some of them were loosely based on fact. In one of his favorite fabrications, she ran away from home and eloped with him. In another, he said she married him because she didn’t have bus fare to get back to Chicago after she graduated. He claimed Mamaw and Papaw, what I call Dad’s parents, gave them a place to stay right after they married so they didn’t have to freeze to death out in the cold or anything. When I asked mom if Dad’s version of things was true, she didn’t exactly deny it, but she made it sound more like she felt sorry for Dad because he was a country boy who always wanted to be a city boy. In her version, Dad married her because she knew all about the big city and could sort of interpret things for him whenever he had to go to Chicago while keeping him from getting lost or in trouble. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit it, I was pretty easily duped into believing just about anything when I was really little. So, I believed them both. However, as best I can determine, here’s what really happened: like me, Dad was shy when he was growing up. By the time he reached college, he had some close friends. A couple of them set him up to meet mom at a party. Apparently, mom did most of the talking. They liked each other a lot and dated for a couple of years. Around the time they were ready to graduate, Dad asked mom to marry him and she said yes. They lived on Mamaw and Papaw’s farm for about a year. Then they moved into their own house. Brenda was born shortly after that and a couple of years later Linda came. About a year and a half after that, I was born, otherwise I wouldn’t be here telling the story. If Dad had a special gift, it was how to be quiet, so much so that if you didn’t happen to notice him, you might think he wasn’t there. When he did talk, you probably needed to listen because usually he was mad about something or there was something important about to happen. Mostly he let mom do the talking, which she was okay with because she loved chatting. Mom always had a lot of friends and usually her friends’ husbands became Dad’s friends. It wasn’t only Dad’s stories I fell for when I was younger. A lot of times, my sisters tricked me, too. What did I know? I was easily misled. Whether it was done as a joke or not, it was not right to lie to a little kid—I’m just saying. Back when I was only six, I still believed in a lot of things people lie about— including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and most of the special offers advertised on Saturday morning TV cereal commercials. Brenda, my oldest sister, who was the first person I knew up to that time who actually went by her given name as it appeared on her birth certificate, enjoyed being the source of my disappointment. She reveled in telling me whenever someone had lied and I had stupidly fallen for the deception. By the time I was old enough to know better, I overcompensated and disbelieved everything anyone told me, except for Sandra, my best friend. She always told me the truth and therefore deserved my trust. Whenever Brenda made fun of me, my other older sister, Linda—whose real name was Belinda—laughed and joined in teasing me because of how gullible I was. To their thinking, older sisters were supposed to do things to their baby brothers. Revenge would come, I promised myself. In the summer of being eightyears-old, I was still subject to my sisters’ abuse, though, for a little while longer. Mom grew up an only child not too far from Lake Michigan and only a few minutes from the Wisconsin border. She lived in this really big house with a lot of extra rooms. To me it seemed like Gram and Gramps had too much space in their big house for just two people, but they didn’t have to worry about where everyone was going to sleep whenever we all came to visit them. When my sisters and I were all little, mom and Dad took us to see Gram and Gramps at least twice every summer on holiday weekends. Each of us kids got our own rooms, which was especially nice for Brenda and Linda because they hated having to share a room at home. Gram and Gramps had a swimming pool in the backyard, which was great, but also they lived close to Lake Michigan and drove a van they would load all of into so they could take us to the beach. Additionally, they had a huge recreational vehicle that looked a lot like a bus. Every October, Gram and Gramps drove it to their place in Florida where they lived from Halloween to Easter—except for the week they flew back home just after Christmas for New Year’s just so they could be there when we went to their house for a couple of days over the holidays. Even though it was always a few days late, that was also when we celebrated Christmas with Gram and Gramps. Gramps used to be an executive of some kind who worked in one of the tall buildings in downtown Chicago. Gram did a lot of charity work, kind of like what mom did between taking care of us kids. Of course, being a kid I didn’t realize how well-to-do mom’s parents were compared to Mamaw and Papaw. Going anywhere for visits was great, especially Chicago in the summertime. On Fourth of July weekend, we piled into my Gram’s van and headed for the beach to stay all afternoon and watch the fireworks over the lake at night. Not that I complained, but I wasn’t sure why it was necessary to go to the beach because we could have easily watched the fireworks from Gram and Gramp’s backyard like we did most every New Year’s Eve. If all we were going to do was swim, we could have done that in the backyard pool at my grandparent’s house. But the lake was more fun, I guess. There were other things to do there as well, like making sand castles and watching people sailing on boats further out on the lake. Also, there were a whole bunch of new kids to meet and new games to learn how to play. Oblivious to all the warnings about overexposure to the sun, especially when there was fun stuff to do, going to the beach meant sunburn for me. Spending an entire day out in the sun, even with sun block on, was extremely dangerous due to my fair complexion. mom had a fair complexion, too, and she said that, like her, I could walk past a picture of the sunset and get burnt. Yeah, she was exaggerating, but that wasn’t far from the truth. I had inherited her red hair, freckles, and extremely pale skin. Since generally I was outside whenever I played, I stayed in the shade as much as possible. Even so, wherever my skin was exposed it turned red, and if I was out too long it blistered. Maybe before the end of the summer, it might sort of turn into a tan, if I was lucky.

Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
Becoming Thuperman: The Thuperman Trilogy, Book 1 is a coming of age novel for young adults and preteens written by Elgon Williams. Sandra and Will had always been friends, despite their parents' ever-present concerns about their closeness. It was as though they had been meant to be best friends; they were on the same wavelength. Now, with summer yawning bright and open in their eighth year, starting it out with a trip from Normal to Chicago, where Will's mom was driving his dad for a business trip, seemed an adventure in itself. They watched as the endless flatlands and occasional silos rushed past on the five-plus hour journey. Will's mom usually took him along on relatively long trips such as this as his older sisters were wont to torment him, and it seemed only natural for him to invite Sandra along for the ride. Will's parents wondered if he was spending too much time at Sandra's house, playing with her fairy castle and the ever-increasing number of fairies Sandra collected. Betty, Sandra's mom, worried that Sandra wasn't sufficiently interested in girly things, like dolls, dresses and looking nice. Her athletically gifted and free-spirited daughter made Betty's protective instincts rear up in concern at the unlikely best friends and Will's influence on Sandra. There was really nothing to worry about, however; Sandra and Will had it all figured out, and this was, after all, the beginning of an endless summer.

Becoming Thuperman transports the reader back to the late 1980s before cellphones and the internet were commonplace items, and kids were relatively unfettered and left to their own devices. Will and Sandra are marvelous creations, complete in themselves and yet ever aware of the world that was out there waiting for them. Williams's portrayal of Sandra as the gifted athlete whose mother tries to manipulate her into being more "ladylike" is, in many ways, a sad commentary on the many generations of young and gifted girls who were never allowed to explore their athletic skills. While Betty's behavior is explained later on in the novel, it just seemed to enhance that sense of loss and missed opportunity. Williams adds a marvelous touch of mystery to his tale with the eerie black van that seems to follow the two friends, and the rumors of missing people from the surrounding areas. Likewise, the special something that Will and Sandra share deepens the sense of awe and wonder that pervades this exceptional coming of age tale. Williams's story is beautifully written, and it's a joy to read. Becoming Thuperman: The Thuperman Trilogy, Book 1 is most highly recommended.