Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta
405 pages
Published 2021
Read from May 16 to June 1
Rating: 3 out of 5
A tale of sapphic love and giant robots and swordfighting! What's not to love? I didn't expect this book to become an enduring favorite of mine, but the cover art is amazing and that summary is hard to resist, even if giant mechas are about as far from my personal special interests as you can get and still be in SFF territory.
As with many YA books I've read over the years, my primary dissatisfaction with Gearbreakers is the plain fact that I'm not its intended audience. Every single character is an angry, aggressive goblin of pure chaos energy. One or even two characters like that would be plenty for me, but it was literally everyone on both sides of the conflict, whether they were the totalitarian city-state's highly trained "Windup" pilots or the scrappy titular Gearbreakers who bring down mechas from the inside with superpowered energy gloves. There are worthwhile themes of trauma and how battling against monsters can, through incessant violence, turn us into monsters, but it was hard to tell apart any of the secondary characters. Everyone roughhouses everyone else, everyone insults each other and chases others around for insulting them, and every single character pauses in the midst of battle to offer some dry quip or snarky remark. Classic YA fare.
Gearbreakers picks up considerably once our two leads finally meet up. It took me two weeks to get through the first half of this book, but only a couple days to finish it from there. Part of this had to do with going on a weeklong roadtrip and camping adventure, which led directly into a weeklong process of moving apartments with my partner R, all of which left precious little time for reading. But still.
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