So I just devoured two good super-hero books in two days by April Daniels. I'm glad I read them back to back because they really read like two parts of the same novel, with character beats being hinted in the first one that don't pay off until the second one.
Dreadnought is about a 15-year old closeted trans girl who gets in the middle of a super-hero fight that ends with the death of that world's Superman analogue, Dreadnough, and as he dies he passes on his powers to her. But the powers also come with a perfect physical body, according to the powers' wielder's mind, so it also physically transforms her body into a feminine body. The book deals with both her elation of her body finally matching her gender and the terror of being forced out of the closet to his abusive parents - and that's on top of the weight of being, well, the successor to the most celebrated hero in the world, with half of her fellow heroes pressuring her to become the next Dreadnought for practical or PR reasons and the other half being uncomfortable with the idea of a teenager trans lesbian girl becoming The Super-Hero (some because they think she deserves to be a normal girl if she wants to, and some others for the obvious bigoted reasons the author doesn't shy way from).
The sequel, Sovereign, is even better, and dares to explore the logical followup - what happens when somebody grows up in an abusive home where they were humiliated continuously and then they start getting acclaimed for punching people really hard? So it becomes a book about anger and the helplessness that comes when you're really good at violence but you can't force your way out of some problems, both super-heroic and personal. It also has a lot of orbital mechanics.
So there's a lot of character drama taking place in the middle of two honest, solid, super-hero plots. The world is well fleshed out, and the supporting cast shines, including a superb "White-cape" mentor figure and a "Grey-cape" vigilante crime-fighting partner. Yes, Daniel knows all the super-hero tropes and plays them like the orchestra in a super-hero movie. It also helps that Dreadnought's powerset is original for a Superman analogue, which keeps things interesting (Dreadnought is not a flying brick - although she can be if she wants to, because she's a reality warper. She can do some nifty stuff by altering the laws of physics or by reading reality itself through her powers).
(and for us hopeless romantics, the romantic subplot is adorkable, with one of the top pre-first kiss conversations I've read, and probably the best meet-the-mother-in-law scenes in fiction)
Highly recommended. Supposedly there's a third book in the works but the author hasn't published anything in the last 3 years - I hope all's OK in her end. I really would like to read more of this universe, because the second book felt like it had a definite conclusion but lacked closure, and I wouldn't mind some.