LitPick Review
Restart: Book 2 is an adventure focusing on a teenager named Ulysses, who along with his two friends (Max and Xavier), is trying to help Max's dad with ending the technological apocalypse that occurred in the previous book. The story begins in space, where the last book ended. Max and her dad have a plan to quickly get back to Earth and hopefully foil what Queen Eve (who also happens to be Max's mom) has in store for Earth and the rest of the humans left there. What ensues is a fast-paced adventure, fighting off those who are under the Queen's control while also meeting some other survivors along the way.
Opinion:
I want to preface this review by stating that I have not read Book 1 of this series, so I'm sure there could be some past tidbits that I don't know about that could have been nice for context. That said, I did appreciate that there were enough references to the past to where I felt like I knew the gist of what had occurred before, and that even though I didn't know the details, I knew enough to understand the story and motivations of the characters.
This was a pretty quick read. The story was short and fast-paced. The language and structure were not complex, so I think this would be a good story for preteens and young people to enjoy. The main character, Ulysses, was 14, and I found him to be a believable young person that I'm sure people around his age could relate to. My favorite character, however, was Xavier. Both Ulysses and Xavier were kind of stuck in this situation and were at the whim of Arden's (Max's dad), and to a lesser extent, Max's, plans. They later get to have more agency in the action occurring, but what I appreciated about Xavier was his more lighthearted attitude. He added a bit of levity compared to Ulysses' more serious demeanor.
Because of the fast pace of the story, it felt like it was all wrapped up pretty quickly relative to the gravity of the situation. But that also meant that there weren't any lulls to push through, which was nice. After the action calmed down, I was thrown off a bit by how Ulysses thinks he's going to reform the new world. He seemed like he wanted to make America great again and mentioned how America's former glory was a gift from God. Of course, this is just a personal opinion, and maybe his viewpoints would have been more apparent to me had I read the first book. He also mentions he doesn't trust AI, which I'm not sure if this just was his own general feeling or if this had been cemented during the first book - not that this is a big deal, but there were moments that he was unkind to an AI being that was trying to protect him, and I just felt bad how flippantly the AI character was treated. I know that the use of technology and screens was a bad thing in the first book, but I'm not sure to what extent this had to do specifically with AI.
Despite those few caveats, I thought this was overall a fun story about how a few kids can make a difference in the world.
