When Diana takes her to Themyscira to save her life, the presence of a mortal causes the island and its Amazons to sicken and proximity to the island causes Alia to sicken. Like Helen, Alia is a Warbringer, which means that her very presence incites discord and strife, and her birth signals that a war is to come. The central human in this story is a teenage girl named Alia Keralis, who is a direct descendant of Helen of Troy. The story picks up in the second half, once the Warbringer mythology has been established and the characters are off in full quest mode. The naivete is understandable, but the humour is flat.) A teenage boy goes skinny dipping, and Diana takes off her clothes as well and wonders why the other teenagers react differently to her nakedness than to the boy’s. I could even predict the kind of jokes Bardugo was going to make about Diana’s fish-out-of-water naivete in our world.

I like the added diversity (the teenagers whom Diana befriends are persons of colour, and one of them is also bisexual and plus-size), but for the most part, I felt like I’ve seen this story before. The problem is, this book’s retelling felt stale.

I realize that this book should be judged as a completely separate entity from the movie, and that superhero stories are rebooted and retold multiple times, even within the comics universe. But pretty much the entire first half is exactly the same. In this book, Diana is 17 rather than in her 20s/30s, the mortal she has to save is a teenage girl rather than a World War I pilot, and her venture into the human world is with present day New York City rather than early 20th century England. Warbringer is a YA take on the Wonder Woman origin story, which for the first half of the book, feels like Bardugo just took the story from the 2017 movie and changed up a few details.

Wonder woman by leigh bardugo