Pokémon Book Reviews

Linkage by blue___22

Linkage:

"Three years after the disbandment of Team Galactic...

A vigilante goes after the grunts who remain. The Champion is kidnapped. And a conspiracy so earth shattering is born, that it takes two to solve it."Genre: Action, Romance

Linkage is a very unique book, loosely basing the book off of Pokémon Colosseum and the Sinnoh games, or at least, what happened after the events of the two games. The villains from both games, Cyrus and Fein, have teamed up to try to take over Sinnoh by turning the people into shadow people. It's up to Cynthia and Wes to stop them before the entire region is under their control.

While I've never played Pokémon Colosseum, I could still follow the book pretty well since the author used very clear descriptions of the characters and scattered the backstory of that game throughout the book. This is the first book I've ever seen that uses the characters from Pokémon Colosseum, along with some of the unique concepts from it, such as shadow Pokémon. I naturally enjoyed it because of this unique take.

While the Pokémon universe is amazing, I loved how the author incorporated something that was clearly a passion of hers engineering. I know nothing about engineering, and it's something that doesn't seem like it would fit into the world of Pokémon. At least, it doesn't seem like it would at first. I was glad to be proven wrong when some of the problems were fixed through engineering, along with some comedic relief through engineering jokes like *SPOILERS* the whole bomb-looking phone. I had to look up a picture of what this would look like, and yes, a phone made from scratch is definitely frightening and would look like a bomb. Apparently, anything simplified to the wires and motherboards are just things that look like bombs. *SPOILERS END*. While I had to look a lot of this stuff up in the beginning, I wasn't exactly sure what the point of this would be later in the book.

That is until the ending came. I loved how engineering wasn't just some side-personal interest that didn't have any sort of purpose. *SPOILERS* It was towards the end of the story when our heroes realized Cyrus and Fein used engineering to create a machine to turn people evil. Our heroes realized if they could reverse engineer the machine, they could snap people out of their trance and stop Cyrus and Fein from taking over *SPOILERS END*. Incorporating real life career goals into this was a really interesting take, and it was just really nice to read. The only sad part to it is that I couldn't connect to what was actually going on. Lots of what I've read went over my head so that I had to reread or ask for clarification, but that was more because I wasn't aware of the engineering science behind it. Once I did figure it out, this material was a bit clearer.

Another thing I really enjoyed in this book was the characters. True, I've never played Pokémon Colosseum, so Wes is a character I was unfamiliar with. From what I could gather in the book, he did something bad that made him want to redeem himself. It wasn't until the end that it clearly stated what happened. All that aside, his character development was realistic. It took him a while to trust Cynthia, who was trying to get him to open up. As I slowly started to learn about his backstory through the book, I realized how much of a smart choice this was when it came to plot development. *SPOILERS* It wasn't until Wes saw his old friend Rui one last time that he realized he had to let go of the past. Moving on from someone you love, whether that person has passed away or has left you broken hearted, is always a challenge. I loved that this scene gave closure for that and allowed him to finally move on *SPOILERS END*. Before then, I could tell Wes was trying hard to change, but it wasn't working. He needed a wake up call, and that was the perfect way to incorporate more of his backstory.