Parents' Guide to Heroes

As HEROES begins, 13-year-old best friends Frank McCoy and Stanley Summer are discussing their favorite subject -- comic books -- and planning their own comic, with Frank as the writer and Stanley, the illustrator. The boys love living in peaceful, sunny Hawaii, where Frank's father is stationed as a Navy fighter pilot and Stanley's dad is a flight crew engineer. Their peace is violently shattered on the morning of December 7, just as the boys are taking a tour of the battleship USS Utah. A wave of Japanese planes appears in the sky and begins attacking battleships in the harbor. A torpedo strikes the Utah and it begins to capsize. Stanley and Frank make a terrifying escape by sliding down the side of the sinking ship and swimming to shore. The boys make it home to discover that some of their neighbors and classmates now see Stanley and his mother, who's Japanese American, as "enemies." With the attack still underway, Stanley and Frank volunteer to take a seriously wounded sailor to the base hospital across the harbor in Stanley's small motorboat, with ships exploding around them, even saving another sailor along the way. The friends are separated in the weeks after the attack, but they remain friends. An original black and white "Arsenal of Democracy" comic featuring a Japanese American superhero -- the comic Frank and Stanley dreamed of creating -- is included at the end of the novel.