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Into The Heartwyld

Hard Reboot was a book that the minute I saw the cover and read the blurb I knew I wanted to get my hands on it. I got lucky and was able to get a physical Arc through Twitter from the publisher and I am forever grateful for the opportunity!

Hard Reboot features Giant fighting mechas in a future so far distance that everyone has jacks installed into their heads and can automatically hook up to the internet, of course this comes at the cost of sever complications if one does not connect safely, or have blockers to prevent malware and ads from hijacking your system and basically causing it to crash (which can like completely kill you). It sounds so freaking awesome but also so freaking scary.

This distance future also touches on how easy they have made consent and knowledge about a persons gender, sexual preference, if they are even in the mood to socialize and so much more. (I would love to have a feature blasting over my head telling people if they could or could not talk to me it would make life so much easier) But there is a catch, all this stuff only works off of Old Earth because Old Earth is trashed and everything left behind is so far behind that Kas (who buys cheap tech because girl is broke) loses all her tech advancements and proceeds to having to figure out how to communicate with Zhi, the girl who scams her.

The book starts out with a bang and immediately I was loving it, we had a mecha fight, a girl getting scammed, pursuits that put peoples life in danger, all this happens in the first 60 pages and this novella reaches 148 pages total. I was immediately sucked into the story, but… and you knew it was coming since I gave this 3 1/2 stars, the middle just took a turn for the slow.

The middle of the story is where you learn and get acquainted with Zhi and Kas and their very fast moving love story and while I am completely here for their love and am super happy for the rep and how natural it felt in the story, it was just 'meh' for me, I wanted more fighting robots. I went into this story wanting as much fighting mechas as possible and I got two fights in total, and that just wasn't enough for this girl who loves giant fighting mechas. Also there is a death in the story and more then likely the length of the story is what ultimately made me go "ehh" when that portion came up because you just didn't get the time to absorb the character before it happened. The middle also gives you more info on why Kas is there on Earth but unfortunately her portion of the story just felt forgotten, she is there for research and while I know she was scammed and she is dealing with that it felt like any connection to her main reason for being there was just passing filler info to give her a reason to be there, and it never felt like her knowledge was used in a strong enough manner to make me believe she was knowledgeable in Mechs like was claimed. Kas and her school story line just felt flat. This can also be said for Zhi, her background is so vague, all we know is she lives to scam people and has scammed one to many people and is now in deep shit for it, but the pursuit that Custis has for her just felt so flat, there wasn't enough to really get behind his anger towards her, and The House was such a vague concept. At times it felt like too much for to little time. The other issue I had was the repetitive dialogue "slag" was used so much that it quickly got annoying and even some of the insults were reused a few times. The swearing I could care less about because that's not something I am offended by but for some it might be a major turn off because that f-bomb was dropped a lot for this novella, so if super foul language is something your just not into this novella will probably bother you.

The action scenes and the fighting mechas are really what make this story inciting for me. I wish there had been more giant fighting mechas because the two we got where great. I loved the designs behind them, the size, the fighting prowl, ugh they are everything I want in my fighting mechas. The fighting started and instantly I was sucked in and I didn't want the it to end. It was easy to follow along with while also being easy to visualize and just all around fun and exciting. I know length wise it probably wasn't doable to have nothing but fighting mechas but I would have been just fine if it was riddled with nothing but constant mecha battles and less love. The little bit of lore we got on the mechas was also interesting, each Empire of days gone by had their own mechas and were known for different strengths, we didn't get the run down on all of them but the few we got I was digging, and it made me yearn for more information on them.


All in all, Hard Reboot is both fast and mid paced with great action scenes and is LGBT+ rep friendly. I just needed more giant fighting mechs.

A decently fun read with some fun world building, but ultimately I think it was a touch too short for any sort of plot or character growth. I never really connected with either of our main characters, and the giant robot fighting was nowhere near as fun as I’d hoped.