Hench

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Science Fiction / Walschots, Natalie	4-week checkout	Due 05-27-2025

"Excerpt on pages 72 and 73 from Ilan Noy © VoxEU"--Title page verso.
"A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2020 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers"--Title page verso.
"Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. As a temp, she's just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called 'hero' leaves her badly injured. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the hands of a hero is far from unique. When people start listening to the story that her data tells, she realizes she might not be as powerless as she thinks. Because the key to everything is data: knowing how to collate it, how to manipulate it, and how to weaponize it."--Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A little disappointing submitted by kkrasity on August 29, 2021, 2:30pm I was very excited to read this book based on its inventive premise of a woman employed by a henchmen agency in a world populated by superheroes and villains. While I loved the diverse cast of characters, I ultimately couldn't get that sucked into the main storyline of the book, where we are asked to root for a group of what are essentially internet trolls. While the book has a lot of potentially interesting things to say about what really makes a hero a hero and a villain a villain, I don't think it was executed all that successfully.

Hilarious premise, light read, and still makes you think submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on July 21, 2023, 7:57am What an unexpected and delightful book! This reminded me a bit of John Scalzi’s _Redshirts_, in that it takes a minor character in a world of otherwise-big-wigs, and thinks about life from their point of view. Would there be a temp agency for data entry clerks for supervillains? I mean, why not? And what happens when something goes wrong for them and they get hurt when the superheroes show up?

_Hench_ chases that premise to a brilliant, unexpected, and ethically ambiguous endpoint. I’ve never come so close to rooting for the bad guys (while still thinking that if all Hitler’s janitors and secretaries quit, the higher ups wouldn’t have had so much time left to plan all the terror they did). This book is funny and clever, and should be on your To Read list if you want a fast, light read that makes you think just a little bit along the way.