I just finished the book (got a little sidetracked, because my mom and I bought guinea pigs today). I have somewhat mixed feelings on it.
On the bad side, it felt rather shallow. A lot of the incidents were repeats from the webisodes, like Wondy's flying mishap and her poorly-designed costume. But they were actually covered better in the short webisodes than they were in the book, which is kind of a problem. I was hoping the book would give me a lot of insight into all the characters, but you really only get to know Wondy and a little bit more about some of the others, far from in depth. Even Wondy is a bit odd, because she's so literal and so unused to regular teen stuff that it's almost an alien perspective. I'm afraid that is going to be repeated in Supergirl's book, which is the next one, because she actually IS an alien. Wondy is a sweet girl who tries way, way, WAY too hard, wants to be a good superhero and wants to make her mom proud, and that plotline runs for the entire book, but it still rings hollow to me. The ending was nice, no spoilers, and it helped some, but I felt like I read pages and pages of...fluff. Kind of. Not even fluff, because I feel like I would have enjoyed sheer fluff more. I kept waiting for this to dig in and for me to get hooked, but it never happened.
On the plus side, the book works with characters that the webisodes don't. Star Sapphire is one of the main players here, while she's barely in the webisodes. Frost is here a lot, too, and both of them are fun because Frost is an amusing mean girl and Star Sapphire's kinda borderline. Cheetah is here for that, too, but she actually gets more focus in the webisodes, I think. Although she comes off looking better in the book. Katana also gets the spotlight a lot. I like what they did with her character, aside from the two (I think only two) mentions of honor. And that she uses both a katana and a samurai sword at one point, but samurai had several types, not just a singular "samurai sword." Hawkgirl was the other hero featured a lot, which was a pleasant surprise, because she's in the webisodes even less than Star Sapphire, I think. She's Latina in this incarnation. Bee, Harley and Ivy actually had fairly small roles compared to these others. Bee and Ivy were treated well in theirs, but Harley is pretty much reduced to only videotaping Wondy and others for her HQTV video channel. She really doesn't do anything else, which was sad. Oh, wait, there was one funny bit with her and Katana in their Debate Club. That was good. Anyway. Barbara is barely in it, though she's also barely in the webisodes. She's not a student. She goes to Gotham City High (or something like that). Likewise, Lois Lane, who has a prominent role, is a student at Metropolis High, but she's a reporter, so she ends up in contact with Wondy a lot. So the shift in character focus was nice, because I expected it to be only about the seven main girls and yet of them all, only Wondy gets developed here. The other development all goes to non-doll characters.
So yeah, mixed feelings on this one. I hope Supergirl's book will be better.
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