"In Over Their Heads" by Margaret Peterson Haddix

This book went a lot faster than its predecessor. I feel like they could have been one long book, but the author had it as two instead. Maybe she thought fusing them would make it too long? Maybe she had plans for a series but then this one wrapped up too neatly for that? Maybe she wrote the first one with a sequel planned but didn't have quite enough material for the sequel? That last guess seems most likely, but I don't really know.

In Over Their Heads picks up where Under Their Skin left off, at |Mammoth Cave. Except that it's discovered there are other people living here. The plotting is messier than the first book, honestly, with half of it being about Jackson the illegal robot kid and his dad, and half of it about everyone else. Actually, that might be why I think it's both messy and short; the plots don't really tie together, and they're both individually too short for my taste.|

Now, don't get me wrong, I did like the book. Especially the part at the end where |(ENDING SPOILERS HERE) robot police show up and try to kill/arrest/otherwise inconvenience the protagonists, discover a bunch of illegally-not-decommissioned robot kids, aaaaaand... are promptly wrecked by a bunch of leftover war robots. (Granted, the leftover war robots don't actually turn out to be on the side of the protagonists, and they do turn out to be very insane, like, megalomaniac kills-for-the-fun-of-it cartoon villain insane. But it turns out fine and some of them do turn into good guys.)| Major moment of awesome there.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, probably, since |all the characters KNOW everyone's a robot, and the descriptions of them revealing their inner machine side aren't played for creepy factor|.

I'll give this one 4 stars, like its predecessor, despite having messier plotting and feeling a lot shorter.

(Endnote: The funniest bit in the entire book was |one of the reformed war robots deciding his name was Ralph. It was just so random|.)