Two Second Review
★★★ ½ ☆ // 3.5 s t a r s
In the most basic sense, Gearbreakers is about a pair of girls (along with a whole bunch of gearbreakers) who are essentially trying to decimate their entire "evil" government. Honestly, it reads more like a romance with a side of dystopia than the other way around.
The Book
Trigger Warnings: gore, torture, gun violence, immolation
Release Date: June 29, 2021
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Genre(s): YA, Sci-Fi, LGBTQIA+, Dystopian
Series?: yes, this is book #1
Page Count: 416
Premise:
We went past praying to deities and started to build them instead...
The shadow of Godolia's tyrannical rule is spreading, aided by their giant mechanized weapons known as Windups. War and oppression are everyday constants for the people of the Badlands, who live under the thumb of their cruel Godolia overlords.
Eris Shindanai is a Gearbreaker, a brash young rebel who specializes in taking down Windups from the inside. When one of her missions goes awry and she finds herself in a Godolia prison, Eris meets Sona Steelcrest, a cybernetically enhanced Windup pilot. At first Eris sees Sona as her mortal enemy, but Sona has a secret: She has intentionally infiltrated the Windup program to destroy Godolia from within. As the clock ticks down to their deadliest mission yet, a direct attack to end Godolia's reign once and for all, Eris and Sona grow closer—as comrades, friends, and perhaps something more...
Review
Gearbreakers has definitely been one of my very anticipated books for 2021 and while it didn't let me down, it didn't live up either. Going into the book, I was ready for a super action centered book about robot-fighting basically (I guess the summary should have warned me though). However, what we get is more along the lines of a romance with some enemies-to-lovers and robots.
The writing. It was, for lack of better words, weird? The one thing that threw me off is how obviously written in the present tense is was when in most books we're super accustomed to a super-switchy past tense. Obviously, once you look past that you're left with descriptions upon descriptions of things that are written in paragraphs but could've been accomplished in a sentence. If you ignore the excessive use of words the humor was pretty top tier.
Sona and Eris were both pretty great MCs, however, both their personalities were basically the same thing. Which is super strange because protagonists usually have really different personalities, but oh well. The rest of the main side characters were pretty great but not exactly attachment-worthy. That was kind of sad because the funny side friend is almost always my favorite character, but no side character was hashed out enough to make it to favorite level.
❝ Yeah, we’re small. Yeah, we’re human. But we’re also gearbreakers
and we’re here to dismantle the fuckers who thought we’d just sit back
and take it. ❞
All in all, Gearbreakers was pretty great for a debut, and I'll still be looking forward to Godslayers, especially after that cliffhanger.
Tropes…
— sapphic (dunno if that's actually a trope but it's there so fight me)
— enemies-to-lovers
— found family (a.k.a. best trope ever)
— robots (or mechas in this case)
— humanity crisis / evil government
Read…If You Liked…
Watch…If You Liked…
Pacific Rim (the first not the second, for the love of god)
Transformers (bc my father would disown me if i missed a chance to promote his precious movie)
ADD GEARBREAKERS TO YOUR GOODREADS SHELF
