I'm a well read grad student who's bluntly honest about all things, although I try to be most honest about myself.
Oh, Transformers Classified. So many mixed feelings about you. You have more movie characters than I expected, and more book time for them than I expected when I first saw them, so I loved you for that. And then you had to go and have massive amounts of massive plotholes which made me sad. And then you had to have chest penises. Cannons. Whatever.
This GIF should tell you what I think about chest cannons rubbing up against each other, and shorting one of them out in the process.
See? See? They might as well be chest penises. Totally. And this was supposed to be a kid's book... See analysis of plot points, and more chest penis talk, below the cut.
Let's go through the plotholes one by one, shall we? Keeping in mind some of them are so large Prime could drive side by side with his whole crew, and with room to spare.
The premise of this book is that Gears crashes on Earth and befriends a young boy, Kevin Bowman, who has lost his parents in Mission City. Kevin hates all Cybertronians - although he just thinks of them as giant robots - until Gears saves Kevin's life. Kevin then proceeds to help Gears in his mission - that of finding a cache of weapons that makes his arch-enemy, Reverb, so powerful that the Decepticon can beat the crap out of Optimus Prime, Ratchet, Bumblebee, Ironhide, and Gears.
Say what? Did Optimus Prime not know about this mission? Did he not know about the weapons? That seems... weak, but not as weak as the other option. That he knew, and was like, "It's cool. Gears hasn't landed yet, but he'll take care of it when he lands." Um, no. You don't leave those kinds of weapons lying around, and you don't forget about them. You find those fuckers, if not to use them yourself, to make sure the 'Cons don't! Fail, Optimus. Fail.
Reverb is supposed to be this super-powerful Decepticon, who can take out communications systems as a speciality, and yet only Gears knows of him? What? Why? Why does he mention bringing the weapons back to Megatron, too, as if the Big M knew about them? And yet Team Prime didn't? Again, I say - say what?
Or how about the fact that a, what, thirteen year-old-boy outsmarts Reverb when all of Team Prime, the military, *and* Gears couldn't do it? Really, Kevin Bowman?
Or, hey, how about the fact that when the Naval Base is on lockdown and Kevin is trying to see his brother, Duane, who works there, Gears throws a hologram over him as a seventeen year-old, and then Kevin talks his way in? By saying, by the way, that Duane told him to come, that he forgot his license at home because he'd been told about the giant robot attacks - which are fairly well known at this point, as Megatron has made his demands in Dark of the Moon, so, like, everyone in the world saw him. The person manning the blockade has no way to contact Duane to even see if he has a brother, much less check on the story, so he gives Kevin a colored pass, and says he can only go in certain areas. He then lets Gears and Kevin drive off unattended. On a naval base. On lockdown. Because they've been attacked by Decepticons. (And yes, the naval officers are aware of both Decepticons and Autobots.) Gears and Kevin, of course, go to the ancient Cybertonian munitions chamber, to try and stop Reverb from finding the weapons.
Oh, plotholes. There are too many of you. If you turn your brain off, and don't think about the plotholes, the story itself is kinda fun. So... it's kinda a wash for me, thus three stars. The writing is solid - I mean, grammar and sentence structure, and the characters are true to form/the movies. Maybe some of the speech patterns get a little too formal - Ironhide - or too informal - Prime - but it's one or two sentences in a book. Kevin is meant to be the hero, and so he's a little Mary Sue-ish. It's not that he can navigate by stars, which is explained. He has some skills that aren't ordinary, but aren't extraordinary, either. Most of the time, it's okay. But when push comes to shove, he shouldn't be outsmarting Prime, his people, and the military all combined. No, just no.
And then there was the porny part. The chest cannons. "...their chest-mounted cannons crashing into each other." Hot.
"..shoving Reverb's cannon aside..." This sounds like it could get rapey...
"And then it was Reverb who was staring down the barrel of his enemy's weapon." Hot again.
"He realized his chest-to-chest collision with Reverb had torn the power leads loose." I'm choosing to read this as, "our chest penises touched, and I blacked out for a minute."
"...tore the still-smoking ancient cannon off Gear's midsection." Um, ow.
I'll be rereading the last two in this series, and should have the reviews up by the weekend.