Reboot by Amy Tintera

Reboot by Amy Tintera

Series: Reboot #1

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

I’m gonna go generous on the stars because I liked it a lot more than I didn’t like it, like 3.75ish territory.

Reboot is a really solid read. I didn’t expect from it what I got out of it, and in this case that’s a very good thing. The fact that its setting centralizes Texas was really just a huge perk. ;]

So Wren. Wren 178. Typically, when a character starts out, they’re weak, a little too soft, tender. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character that started out as strong kinda… regress. However, the wonderful thing about Wren’s “regression” is in its base — because her supposed strength is derived mostly from her emotionlessness due to the amount of time (178 minutes) she was dead before she Rebooted, coming back to life sharper, faster, more resilient. As she learned that she could, in fact, feel despite her belief that she couldn’t, it didn’t contribute to her regression but rather her progression. Hats off to author Tintera for pulling that one off. I was with Wren the whole way through.

And Callum, Rebooted 22 miuntes after death, was the sweetest thing since shoe strings. He saw in Wren what no one, not even herself, saw in her, and he was seriously just adorable in every imaginable size, shape and fashion. I look forward to where the world takes him and where he goes with it because though he may seem fragile with his easygoing smile, he’s anything but.

I really hadn’t expected any kind of dystopian society from Reboot, but that’s kinda what I got. The linking of the disease, KDH, to the enhanced physiology of the Rebooted blindsided me, but once I adjusted to it, the rest fell into place — the HARC facilities used as holding cells for Reboots to be used as slaves, trained, charged with impossible and un-accounted-for carnage; the disrepair and despair fallen thick over the dilapidated cities of Texas, destroyed, rebuilt and divided; the war in the past that shaped the fates of retaliating Reboots and every one afterward; even the strange behavioral anomaly taken hold of the Reboots who’d only been dead for an hour or less. Seriously, this story’s nowhere near as straightforward as I was expecting!

Though the end seemed mostly wrapped up, it was left somewhat open (which, honestly, were it not in a trilogy, I’d nod my head at and say, “Okay”), and I am pretty excited to see where it goes from there. I appreciated the lighthearted note it left off on, but it can go anywhere. And I wanna know where!

Also, SUPPORT TEXAS AUTHORS. :D