Rebel by Amy Tintera: Meh

Rebel 

by 

Amy Tintera

              As usual this is a sequel so there will be spoilers.

The last book left off on a literal cliffhanger of all the escaped Reboots (also known as super-hot teenage zombies) flying in stolen shuttles to a Reboot reservation in hopes of finding a place to live in peace. The second book of course dashes those hopes to smithereens. They land at the reservation only to find that it’s less of a paradise and more of a militaristic state arming itself to literally wipe out all the humans. Which i’m sure will work great since the only people who will be left are super-powered teenagers who don’t know how to do . . . anything really. 

What’s this budgeting you speak of? Tell me how does plumbing work? Hey can anybody here even read? Yep there’s no way this can go wrong.

Characters

Wren: alright if you guys can’t tell I’m experiencing a tiny bit of sequel blues here. Despite that I still like Wren a good bit. I won’t be naming her one of my favorite characters of all time or anything but she’s not bad. This time around she’s learning to be a bit more expressive/human/likable. Not that I didn’t like her in the first one. her likability was just dependent on her being a crazy awesome killing machine. 

I’d wager that this time around she’s got a bit more personality.

Callum: what do I even say about Callum? He’s basically there to be everybody’s moral compass. Kind of like Peta from the Hunger Games or Fletcher from Skulduggery Pleasant. Because of that he’s maybe not as cool or scary as some of the other characters but I liked him regardless. I wouldn’t say he had a lot of character development in this one but we did get alternating chapters narrated by him so it counts.

Likes

I still liked Callum and Wren: YA romances are usually impressively bad. It sucks but they are. I was pretty surprised to find that I was actually invested in Callum and Wren’s romance in the first one and I was decently pleased to find that nothing much had changed in the second one. My one complaint is that there was a part that nearly ‘broke them up’ for some cheap romantic tension. Thankfully Tintera pulled it back and didn’t let such a thing happen.

Um . . . Closure? I didn’t know this book was the last one. I sort of assumed it was going to be a trilogy. In fact, I thought there was going to be a third book basically all the way up until the last two chapters. But hey! There was a happy ending. Could it be that a dystopian book realized that not everything had to be doom and gloom? it was lovely I liked it.

Dislikes

I kind of felt like I was reading the Hunger Games: I’ve mentioned a few of the similarities but here’s a few more.

·       Heroine and hero escape to perceived safe zone

·       ‘Safe zone’ turns out to be run by people who are just as bad as the last people

·       Heroine is super important and the face of the rebellion

·       She doesn’t care, like at all

·       It’s up the morally conscious love interest to convince her to help and make a difference

There’s probably more but those are the most obvious. Now for some people being like the Hunger Games might be a good thing but personally I wasn’t a fan. I read the Hunger Games series but honestly my interest level went down exponentially with each book and I basically grumbled my way through the last one. Rebel did not earn itself any points by reminding me of those books.

the anti-climax: I’m going to assume that Y’all know what ‘climax’ means and move on. So Micah is built as being a creepy creeper who would kick your but soon as look at you. I mean he’s managed to scare and couple hundred semi-undead fighting machines into submission so he’s got to have something going for him. Heck! He’s even portrayed as Wren’s equal. Nope. When things finally come to head, it takes a paragraph . . . maybe two to take him down. Why? Don’t get me wrong I’m not one to enjoy page after page of combat dialogue but that was just sad.

All that being said Rebel wasn’t a bad book. Yes it had some problems, yes I had some sequel sadness. But that might just be me. I have never been a dystopian fan,

I am aware of that btw

 Reboot caught my attention because in the grand scheme of things it had a pretty interesting premise (even if said premise is teenage mutant hot stuff zombies). I guess my problem was that after the premise was explored, explored not explained because there was some sort of vague X-men-ish next human evolution kind of thing, there just wasn’t anything else to keep my attention.