Tom Swift Inventors' Academy, Book 5 - The Spybot Invasion

While the stories are definitely shorter and a bit more juvenile (due to the title character's younger age), I am actually enjoying this latest Tom Swift series.  I liked the previous series S&S put out some years back, the Tom Swift, Young Inventor series, but sadly, that one did not last long - only six books.  And since this is book five, and books six and seven have already been solicited, I think this series has a good chance of outlasting the previous one.  The stories are creative, and being set in a scientific academy for students with an aptitude for creating inventions, there are certainly plenty of story ideas waiting to be told.

 

The Spybot Invasion features Tom and his friends, Noah, Sam, and Amy, going up against an army of cute little robots that are spying on the students at Swift Academy. Only, Tom doesn't find the strange little robots that have suddenly started appearing all over school to be that cute.  For Tom, they are a reminder of a movie he once saw that scared him - a movie "full of big-eared little monsters that looked a lot like these plastic goblins."  There are several references to the movie throughout the book, and it is finally revealed to be ... Gremlins!  Hard to think of Gremlins as being an "old" movie, but I guess it did come out more than thirty years ago at this point, so I suppose it can be considered old.  Which, of course, means I am old, too!

Anyway, the first clue that something is wrong is a conversation Tom overhears in an elevator, where one student is accusing a friend of ratting out something he said to a teacher.  A short while later, Tom overhears someone say the exact same thing he said to Amy earlier, but he can't catch who said it.  Who would want to mimic him?  And why?  Then, in one of his classes, a student is upset with her boyfriend for saying something he shouldn't have.  And more and more students begin to have fights over things that were said, but which the other party claims they never said.  And then it happens.  In class, one of the "cute" little robots repeats something that one of the students says.  Within seconds, all of the other robots begin repeating the same thing.  And thus begins Tom's latest mystery.

Lucky for Tom, he had thrown the robot attached to his locker inside his locker, so it didn't get confiscated when the principal had them all pulled away.  He and Noah take it home to inspect it - but they turn around for one second, and when they turn back, it's gone!  Something fishy is going on, and when Tom finds out that a shipment of technical supplies for his father's business has gone missing, there is a more compelling reason to uncover the truth.  Is someone using those robots to try and spy on his father?

The culprit is not really all that surprising - he is pretty easy to spot early in the story - but it is interesting to follow Tom and Noah as they navigate the clues they find to uncover the identity of the spy.  And while there are not really any life-threatening cliffhangers to speak of (which seems to be the case for most of these Tom Swift books), Tom and Noah do end up locked in a storage unit with no cell reception and no apparent way out.  Otherwise, the chapters conclude with either revelations, surprises, or simple statements of fact.  Not exactly what one would expect from a Stratemeyer series (regardless of who is publishing it now), but it does sort-of work for this series.  Tom and his friends do not need the hair-raising, death-defying cliffhangers, as their mysteries are more cerebral in nature and are more about technological tracing than finding kidnappers or swindlers or the such.

There is a fun reference in the book that made me smile.  On page 39, when Sam suggests the robot gremlins are actually an alien invasion, Noah tells her, "You watch way too much Doctor Who," to which she promptly (and accurately!) replies: "don't diss the Doctor!"  As a fan of the current Doctor Who series on BBC, I'm always pleased when books by American authors reference the show or its fandom.

RATING:  8 inflatable body protection bags out of 10 showing young readers that science can be just as much fun for kids and teens as it can be for adults!