What if one day you woke up and had superpowers? What would you do with them; how would you use them? Would you use them to your own advantage, or to help others? Would you be able to keep a normal life with them? This is the dilemma for sisters April, May and June. In The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May & June by Robin Benway, these girls find themselves with abilities on a journey home from school. April, the eldest, can see the future in dreams and visions. May, the middle-child, can literally vanish in front of people. And the youngest, June, can read anyone’s mind. They start to disagree though, on how they are going to use these powers.
These abilities get them into a lot of trouble; combine that with the troubles of high school, and they’ve got quite a mess. April goes completely limp and can’t use her senses while she has a vision, so she automatically brings attention to herself. The visions she sees are usually confusing, only making sense when they happen, often making them difficult to predict. She also sees some things that she’d rather not see, and tries to stop them from happening, but after a while, it’s clear that they will happen no matter what she does. But still, a horrible vision of June keeps coming back, haunting April, and she’ll do anything to protect June.
May has so much difficulty with her powers, but in a different way. Being a middle-child, and already emotionally damaged, makes it easy for her to disappear from everyone and just hide. She hides from all her troubles, including the incredibly annoying June, the bossy April, her disappointing father, and most especially from Henry. He is her history tutor, and the opposite of her. He is always decked in Stanford gear, is a study bug and thinks she’s a slacker. She doesn’t seem to be a huge fan of him either, especially after a party goes wrong when he confesses something to a whole room of people.
June however, is the only sister who views the gifts as, well, gifts. She loves the fact she can read peoples’ minds, figure out their secrets and then use it to help her earn the respect of Miss popular, Mariah. She just wants to be popular and then she’ll finally be happy, or that’s what she says. Being liked is all that matters to her, not what she does to people. April and May are always telling June to be careful who her friends are, and that using your powers for your own benefit will come back at you later. June dismisses their ideas immediately and continues her selfish ways.
I’m currently halfway at chapter 11 on page 113. Its good so far, and it makes me wonder what I would do if I had powers like that. How would I use them and how would they affect my life? I am also fascinated with the characters themselves. I look at these characters and see them in real people that I know, minus the abilities. I, myself, find that I am slightly like May in the way that I am not popular and have no desire to be, and I hide from my feelings a lot. This book is the high school equivalent of X-men, and I’m enjoying every minute of it.
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