Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

First of all, I was gifted this book by the author, but not even in exchange for a review.  She didn't ask anything of me, and I never promised anything, much less a positive review.   But, yes, full disclosure: I know her and am friendly with her on BL.  

This took me a while to read for, well, one reason: I had known what would happen at the end, and was dreading finishing for being spoiled.   I was right, it was pretty heartbreaking for me, but it was because I had come to care for one particular character.   Which is impressive: it was a robot that didn't talk, and didn't have a strong personality, but I still really liked it as the story went along.  

There was a lot to like about this book.   The humans did have strong personalities, the humor was quirky, the action barreled along quickly, and the way the robot was built seemed pretty well grounded in reality.    

That being said, there were a couple minor issue I noticed popped up multiple times, although I also know that one might be cultural differences here.   There were times when the punctuation seemed odd, but it was also consistent.   (It drives me crazy when it's not consistent, and I've come to assume consistent may mean differences depending on where one lives.)   If this is a deal breaker for people, though, I figure I'd warn them.   

There were a couple occasions where the grammar was funky enough - missing apostrophes, for example - that I believed it simply needed one more quick going through .   This is one of the rare cases where it was obviously edited, and so it didn't bug me enough to really knock down stars, but I did knock down one half a star.   The thing that clinched it for me was on pages 106 and 107: Hawkeye shoots and then there's a mention of Duds. 

"The robot knew the precise location of Duds the moment he fired, so it simply turned to face the church, opened its rocket rack and fired at Hawkeye."

This was the only moment something this large was overlooked, however.   It's rare that I get into a story or care enough about characters to not let this irk me more, but I've also been told I'm overzealous in my grammar fixes and noticing such inconsistencies by some people.   One more quick go-through would have elevated this up to four and a half-stars. 

That one last half star?   That, my friends, is a losing battle.   It had to happen this way, it had to end this way, but there were so, so many tears.   Sometimes it just has to happen that way, but it really bummed me out.