Gearz

Gr 9 Up—Karen Chugg is unpopular, to say the least. She sits at a separate table in the cafeteria because she is allergic to peanuts and a multitude of other foods. She isn't stylish like the popular girls. She gets straight A's. And she's a fan of The Brady Bunch. Because the teen wants a dog (but is allergic to them), she decides to get a robotic dog called a Roodle. Meanwhile, the President of the United States, in an effort to protect himself from assassination attempts and raise his deplorable approval rating, decides to get robotic bodyguards. The Robo-National company gets the orders mixed up, and hilarity ensues. Karen's robot bodyguards are programmed to protect her at all costs, so they disguise themselves as ordinary (but metallic) teenagers and follow her to school. Karen does her best to get along with them and nicknames her companions Marcia, Jan, and Cindy. Meanwhile, the president tries to get his bodyguards back using increasingly over-the-top methods. The artwork is cartoony and colorful, if sometimes a little dark. The female bodyguards are rather impractically designed to be very shapely in all the right places, and the sexualized image chosen for the cover might turn off a lot of female readers who would otherwise be the ideal audience for this book.—Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library