Review: Reboot by Amy Tintera

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 have wanted to read Reboot since I first heard about it so as soon as it came up on Edelweiss I smashed the request button and sat there staring at the screen eagerly for about twenty minutes, until I realised that I wasn't going to get a response straight away and sulked off to go do some washing (or something like that...). I honestly found the idea of a book where humans that have died and come back to life are used as soldiers extremely fascinated. This isn't a zombie book, the reboots are nothing like zombies, this book is like a mixture of cyborg books like Mila 2.0 and survival books like Divergent and it really worked.

The characters in this book were awesome. I loved that usually in YA books we see the heroine go from weak to strong, whereas it was kind of backwards in this book - Wren starts aout as a major unemotional toughie and by the end she has a much more vulnerable view of life, which was great to see. I also really liked Callum, despite the fact that he was always so peppy, I honestly think it's just what Wren needed, so I was able to ignore the annoying parts. Okay, so I will agree with the nay-sayers that the romance did happen extremely quickly, and the change in Wren from as emotional as a brick wall to in love happened almost instantly, but I did like the romance between this couple, and would love to read more about them.

There was some action and butt-kicking, and since this is a semi-political dystopian there was, of course a resistance and a secret refuge, none of which was grund breaking territory, however what really sold this book to me was Tintera's writing. Whilst some people may complain about the info-dumping, to me it was great and there wasn't too much. The writing style actually really reminded me of Veronica Roth, which is yet another reason I would recommend this book to fans of Divergent.

Overall, Reboot was a thrilling zombie/robot/dystopian/action/romance mash-up that I would recommend to anybody looking for a fresh romantic dystopian. It may not have been the most original sci-fi release of the year (that one goes to Arclight so far), but it was definitely one of the better.

Overall Rating: B+

Book released 7th May 2013 by HarperTeen

Book received from the publisher (via Edelweiss) in exchange for an honest review.