By Shane Berryhill

The Adventures of Chance Fortune: Chance Fortune and the Outlaws is the first in a middle grade series about young Tennessee native Josh Blevins. In Josh’s futuristic world, super humans, aliens, and robots mingle freely and intergalactic travel has become a regular occurrence. Josh, through some dubious connections and little white lies, gains entrance into the esteemed Burlington Academy for the Superhuman. Since he does not actually have any superpowers, Josh does this under the falsified persona of Chance Fortune, his “superpower” being luck.

At Burlington Academy Josh meets a kaleidoscope of extraordinary characters—some friends, some enemies—and ultimately finds himself caught up in a struggle for the fate of the universe.

Chance Fortune and the Outlaws
Shane Berryhill Tor/Starscape, $17.05
(272 p) ISBN: 0-765-31468-1

“A strong echo of The Incredibles runs through Berryhill’s debut, set in a word where superheroes are taken for granted as a part of day-to-day affairs. Joshua Blevins has been star-struck by these heroes all his life. At age 9, he encounters Captain Fearless, who takes him under his wing and trains him for five years. But all appears for naught when Joshua’s application to Burlington Academy for the Superhuman is turned down on the grounds that, ‘as a normal human, the Academy has nothing to offer you.’ Joshua and his mentor are not so easily deterred, and Captain Fearless fakes some documents to get Joshua accepted under the name Chance Fortune. Chance makes new friends quickly, young heroes-in-waiting like himself: the electrically charged Shocker, the elastic Private Justice and psychic named Psy-chick. After a lengthy training sequence that references Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card with both a wink and a nod (one of Chance’s classmates Space Cadet, or S.C., has a roommate named Orson), Chance learns that the school is connected to The Shadow Zone, ‘a dimensional prison reserved for super villains too powerful or too diabolical to be jailed by conventional means.’ Readers weary of Potter-esque fantasy but hungry for another semi-humorous/semi-serious school setting, and lovers of superhero stories in general, will delight in this first volume in The Adventures of Chance Fortune series, ideally structured for many further adventures at Burlington. Age 10-up. (Aug.)”

— Publishers Weekly