[Book Review] Transformers Classified: Switching Gears

[darthneko]

Transformers Classified: Switching Gears

Ryder Windham & Jason Fry
220 pages
Young Readers, Grade Level: 3 - 7

Amazon | Barnes and Noble

In the Nevada desert a 12-year-old boy gets swept up in a thrilling adventure when he stumbles across two giant robots battling in the dust. The boy and a new Autobot friend set off to secure a secret bunker before the Decepticons can find it. But the robot they left behind is a Decepticon in disguise, and he tells Bumblebee and the other Autobots that the boy and his friend are up to no good. Will the truth be revealed in time?

Rose's Rating:






Things this book is:

Aimed at young readers, so the sentence structure is kept short and a little simple.

Movie!Verse - set after the movie trilogy, so Mission City, Egypt, and Chicago have all happened. NEST is a thing. Ironhide is black, not red, and Optimus has a flaming paint job. Just FYI.

Available on Kindle and Nook as well as paperback.

Things this book is not:

Dumb.

Seriously, it's not. I enjoyed this more than any of the movie novelizations. Within the first two chapters there is more Cybertronians-talking-to-other-Cybertronians-and-not-to-humans and Cybertronians-with-individual-personalities then all three of the Bay movies gave us combined. It struck me as the best parts of G1 - the Cybertronian centric bias instead of human focus - used to construct a kid friendly version of the movies.

Sam Witwicky and company are nowhere to be found in this book. The new protagonist, Kevin Bowman, is just a kid - he struck me mostly like Raf from Transformers Prime, only sans the genius computing skills. Pre-teen kid who's already had his life impacted by Mission City, and then has the misfortune - or fortune - of being nearby when Gears makes landfall. Barring some briefly mentioned top brass military generals, a couple of working-with-'Cons villains, and some of Kevin's peers who all may brief appearances, he's really the only named human with any role in the book.

Bottom line, this book delighted me for it's treatment of Cybertronians as people, not stereotypes or giant war machines. Is Ironhide trigger-happy? Yes, but he also comes across as just having fun with it. Bumblebee and Ratchet teasing each other, mostly through means that are going right over the heads of the surrounding NEST personnel. Cybertronians grieving their dead. Cybertronians dancing circles around human technology without even thinking about it, and when they can't there's a reason for it. Given that I'm in this fandom for the giant alien robots and not their human sidekicks, I give this book full kudos for giving me more of what I want.

Switching Gears is the first in the trilogy. I'll be reviewing the others as soon as I read them.

I'll leave you with the first time I cracked up in glee from this book:
"Remember how we did it at the Battle of Polyhex?" Ironhide asked his leader.

Polyhex had been a province on Cybertron and the site of several battles. Keeping his blue eyes fixed on bombshock, Optimus answered, "Which Battle of Polyhex?"

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. ::
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