Review: ‘Reboot’ by Amy Tintera

I‘ll start this post by saying that I don’t like zombie stories. That may make some people decide to unfollow me, but I’m putting it out there. I don’t have an issue with the science behind the concept… I just don’t like the idea of dead people trying to feast on the living. It grosses me out. The Walking Dead is nightmare fodder. There are too many insides on the outside…

So for me, reading Reboot is probably the closest thing I’ll get to reading a zombie story. I still don’t even know if I would call the Reboots zombies. Sure, they are technically people who have died and come back to life, but since the main characters are all kids who don’t feel the need to eat human flesh, it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just really super tough kids who heal quickly. Some are a bit more emotionless than others, but I’ve met some pretty apathetic teens who could probably give the Reboots a run for their money.

Synopsis: Wren was dead for one-hundred seventy-eight minutes before waking up, which makes her the most dead of all the Reboots. She seems to be emotionless, but what others see and what she goes on in her head are two different things. Then along comes Callum, only dead for 22 minutes (practically human!), who sees beyond her rough exterior to the person behind the number. Suddenly things are far more complicated because Callum questions everything, and asking questions is a dangerous thing in their world. Reboots are property, not people, and if Wren wants to keep them both safe she needs to make sure he starts acting like a proper Reboot before it’s too late.

Second admission of the blog: When I started reading this book I kept picturing Wren as a boy. I had read the blurb so long ago that it completely slipped my mind that the main character was actually female, and there aren’t any cues in the first chapter to indicate otherwise. The level of violence the character was engaged in just automatically made me think that Wren was a guy (I know, sexist of me) and I was pleasantly surprised when I realized my mistake. Not in a “yeah, girls can hit things too!” kind of way, but more in a “wow… that author managed to completely leave out any mention of gender, which has pointed out my unconscious sexist beliefs I didn’t even know I had…” kind of way.

I have to give Amy Tintera props for writing a different sort of zombie apocalypse story. I don’t know what further books in the series will bring, but if she manages to avoid all the things I dislike about other stories in the genre (small group of survivors trekking through the wilderness trying to avoid being eaten… oops, someone was bit and now we’re all going to have an existential crisis about what to do even though this person is going to try to eat our faces in a few hours), then I will definitely continue reading.

LC rating:  (great book)