Reboot (Review)

Reboot: Reboot | Amy Tintera
YA, Sci-Fi, Dystopia

Characters ★★★★☆

Setting ★★★★☆

Writing Style ★★★★☆

Five years ago, Wren Connolly was shot three times in the chest. After 178 minutes she came back as a Reboot: stronger, faster, able to heal, and less emotional. The longer Reboots are dead, the less human they are when they return. Wren 178 is the deadliest Reboot in the Republic of Texas. Now seventeen years old, she serves as a soldier for HARC (Human Advancement and Repopulation Corporation).

Wren’s favorite part of the job is training new Reboots, but her latest newbie is the worst she’s ever seen. As a 22, Callum Reyes is practically human. His reflexes are too slow, he’s always asking questions, and his ever-present smile is freaking her out. Yet there’s something about him she can’t ignore. When Callum refuses to follow an order, Wren is given one last chance to get him in line—or she’ll have to eliminate him. Wren has never disobeyed before and knows if she does, she’ll be eliminated, too. But she has also never felt as alive as she does around Callum.

The perfect soldier is done taking orders.

REVIEW

Exciting, dark, heart-wrenching.

Oh, this book! *sighs* This book!

Reboot took everything I thought I knew about robots, zombies, people who have come back from the dead, and turned it on its head. It's a pretty common thing to think of people who have returned from the dead as emotionless machines, and the beginning of this book goes along with that. Wren, a girl who was dead for 178 minutes before coming back, is a thoughtless cog in the machine known as HARC. She is a soldier and she follows every order without a second thought or a single question. Pretty in-keeping with what I expected.

But then a new Reboot, comes to the facility - a guy who was dead for only 22 seconds - and he shakes up Wren's world. He still has a lot of human emotions, he questions everything, and he refuses to carry out orders to kill. He changes her, makes her question things she hadn't before. Amy Tintera creates a world where the undead can have emotions, thoughts, and desires like a living person. Personally I haven't read anything like this before.

It's a lot sci-fi, a little bit dystopian, and a hell of a lot of 'Lets kill the establishment'. From start to finish I enjoyed it. It was thrilling, chilling, and other things that end with illing. As a long time fan of science fiction I adored how this book read and I flew through it. Wren was a unique MC, and Callum was an adorably human Reboot love interest. The antagonists were not your usual antagonists, and the concept of the book should have felt overdone but didn't.

Overall, a fresh science fiction with heart-warming emotion and a chilling danger. Would recommend to everyone who likes their books edgy and different.