Tom Swift Inventors' Academy, Book 4 - The Virtual Vandal

The young inventor is back in the fourth novel of his latest series from Simon & Schuster. While it has been a number of years since the last Tom Swift series (the Young Inventor series back in the mid-2000s), it seems S&S is hoping that this one will fare better than the previous one, which only lasted six books before it was cancelled.  Like both of the current Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, this one is in first-person narrative and usually runs 150 pages or less - which means the stories are quick, leaving little room for in-depth descriptions or much characterization.  Yet, despite these drawbacks, this series has actually been pretty fun to read so far.

The Virtual Vandal finds Tom and his friends, Noah, Sam, and Amy, preparing for a summer camp, where the students of Swift Academy of Science & Technology will field test their inventions in a competition against other advances technological schools to see who can come up with the most ingenious tech to help better the world.  Tom and Noah are hard at work on a device that will help seed clouds to create rain, while Sam and Amy are working on a secret project that they won't even tell their best friends about. And while all the other students from the three schools are working hard to perfect their own inventions, the one thing that everyone is raving about and can't get enough of is Noah's latest creation - a virtual reality world that is set up to look like Swift Academy - only, the kids are able to make their own modifications and create their own features in the game - from making the second floor into a zombie apocalypse to having a dinosaur poster come to life and attack the players!  But Noah, Tom, Amy, and Sam have a secret of their own within the game - for only they know how to get into the basement of the "school," and it is there that they have set up the means to leave messages for one another...

What I find interesting is that the title would seem to indicate that the vandal is somehow attacking through the virtual world, or that he or she is somehow disrupting the virtual game - but nothing could be farther from the truth.  The mystery, instead, focuses on the inventions on which the students at Swift Academy are hard at work.  Before the camp even begins, some of the students face problems with their creations.  They appear to be simple mishaps, or perhaps misplaced parts.  But soon enough, the problems get bigger and more students are affects.  And when everyone gets to camp, it seems all of the students are Swift Academy have had their inventions tampered with, including Tom and Noah's!  Well, all except one, that is.  It seems that Sam and Amy's invention has not been tampered with at all. And a rumor is quickly spreading that Sam is the one behind all of the vandalism in an effort to ensure she wins the competition!

The identity of the vandal doesn's really come as any big surprise - however, that is not to say the book doesn't offer up a big surprise for long-time Tom Swift fans.  The book features the return of an old Tom Swift character, someone who was a sometime nemesis of the genius inventor - Andrew Foger! For those who don't know (and I was one of those!), online research reveals that Andy Foger was Tom's antagonist in the early books of the first Tom Swift series, and the character popped back up again in the Tom Swift, Young Inventor series in the mid-2000s (which I did read, but I didn't recall Andy from that series).  It's nice to see that the author at least brought back some of Tom's history into this series - I guess we will have to wait and see whether Andy pops up again in this series to create trouble for Tom and his friends...

At only 141 pages, the story moves long at a pretty swift pace (pun intended!), but I think had the author been given more pages to work with, the story and characters could have been fleshed out more to create a great tale with more suspects and some additional time for the vandal to create havoc among the students.  Maybe now that Penguin has purchased Simon & Schuster, the Stratemeyer properties (Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift) will be allowed to have longer stories that will allow for more characterization, more plot development, and richer, detailed descriptions to help make the story even more engaging.

RATING:  8 survival cabin shipping containers out of 10 for showing readers just how ingenious Tom Swift and his friends can be!