The Unforgettable Logan Foster, by Shawn Peters

I don't remember any books about kids with superpowers in the comic book sense of the word back when I was an actual middle grade fiction reader (decades ago in the early 1980s....); lots of kids with preternatural gifts, but no young superheroes.  It's been fun over the past ten years to get a chance to read all the books in this subgenre, all with different twists, such as this new one--The Unforgettable Logan Foster, by Shawn Peters (January 18, 2022, Harper Collins).

Logan Foster is not a superhero.  He's a kid who's bounced in and out of foster homes, and now that he's twelve, his hopes of getting adopted are practically nil.  It's hard for him to imagine prospective parents who want a kid with an eidetic memory that pours information from his mouth in an unexpected, and often unwelcome, way, a kid whose social skills are non-existent.  But then Gil and Margie arrive, and maybe he has found a real home...

Except that Gil and Margie are seriously weird.  Logan's memory records every perplexing thing he notices, but the actual reason was not something he could have guessed--they are superheroes, whose adventures have been chronicled in the comic books Logan loves!  

Superheroes have been going missing, an earthquake-causing villain is terrorizing the west coast, and now Logan and his memory are pawns in a struggle to control his foster parents and the other superheroes who had dedicated their life to the common good.  And though Logan might not be traditionally super-powered, his gifts are key to saving the day!  (Helped by an new, actual friend--a neighborhood girl who is also more than she seems to be; she is a great character, btw).

It's a fun (also funny) and fast-paced, with mortal peril and considerable action once things really get going.  The reader is essentially told by Logan that he is unlikeable, but this is not the impression the reader, who sees from his point of view, gets (the reader, of course, doesn't actually hear a constant flood of whatever information is bubbling up in Logan's mind, which one can see would potentially be annoying). Instead, Logan, to me at least, was a neuro-divergent kid who desperately needed love, appreciation, and validation, and it was great to see him getting those from both his new foster parents and his new friend!  I hope we get another book--this one ends with some questions still unresolved.

In short, an excellent addition to the corpus of MG superhero stories!

disclaimer--review copy received from the publisher