Too many typos for a 5 star, but otherwise it was like having the show again. Can't wait till the next one. ( )

Full disclosure, I am a hardcore The Pretender fan, so I was eager for my Jarod fix. Rebirth delivers! It is a reboot, which changes the canon, but the insight into Jarod's head is worth it! I loved the added depth and action in the book and was hungry to read the next book Saving Luke. This is a series I hope will continue! ( )

I've been a huge fan of the 90s TV series The Pretender since I first discovered it on DVD a few years back. The basic premise is that the main character, Jarod, is a genius who was kidnapped by an evil corporation when he was very young. They trained him to solve problems, to learn any skill incredibly quickly, and to get into people's heads, and they put him to work using these abilities for their own ends. Then one day he escaped, and now he wanders around the US slipping into different roles using his chameleon-like abilities, helping people (especially people whose problems touch on his own issues about identity and family), and evading pursuit while searching for his parents and investigating the mysteries of the past.

It's kind of an odd little show, a strange mixture of formulaic 80s-style TV and the more complex, shades-of-gray, story-arc-based sort of thing that TV was then in the process of becoming. In many ways, I think it worked far better than it really ought to have.

It was canceled with most its big mysteries still unsolved, then brought back for a series of TV movies which were in turn canceled before they could wrap everything up. Although that may not actually be a bad thing; the last one was pretty WTFish, in a not-good way.

Given all that, when I heard the original showrunners were eager to revive the show in any form they could, starting with a series of novels, I was equal parts trepidatious and curious. And... well, I was right to be trepidatious.

To begin with, I was expecting this to be a sequel, or maybe a prequel or something set sometime during the series. It's not. It's a reboot, more or less. It starts over right from the beginning, after Jarod's escape, and while it borrows a great deal from the series' pilot episode, including entire scenes lifted almost verbatim, many of the details are different. The biggest of these is the timeframe: everything has been moved forward by 20 years, so that Jarod's initial abduction, which originally took place in 1963, now happens in 1983. Which I think is hugely problematic, as I believe the entire premise works much better, and is much easier to accept, when it's rooted in that particular point in history. In fact , the whole "reboot" thing just befuddled me at first, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the point was. Surely, people who aren't fans of the series are not going to bother picking up this book, and people who are fans would much prefer something that's part of the series as they already know and love it? I know I certainly would! But then a friend of mine who is also a fan of the show pointed out that the authors have been talking about their hopes for a movie version, and no doubt wanted to have a fresh, up-to-date version all ready to go. Which, although I don't much like it, does makes a certain amount of sense. Not that I think it's ever going to happen.

Anyway. The plot starts off following the pilot of the TV series reasonably closely, even putting Jarod in the same place, playing the same role. But then it diverges wildly, becoming a drawn-out, muddled, faintly ridiculous story involving some kind of terrorist plot. Exactly what kind, I don't know, because it ends in the middle, to be continued in the the next volume. Which I am not remotely interested enough to go and pick up.

The writing's pretty bad, too. You can really tell these guys are screenwriters with little or no experience writing prose. Although I think one of them is probably better than the other, judging by the way the quality varies. At its worst, though, it's written in some kind of clueless, over-the-top attempt at an action thriller style, featuring weird random italics all over the place and some embarrassingly painful attempts to make things sexy.

At least the writers haven't forgotten how to do dialog for these characters. They do try a little too hard to make every single one of Miss Parker's lines clever and snarky, but otherwise, both Parker and Jarod are recognizable as the characters I remember. There are even a few moments with some surprisingly good insights into Jarod's perception and how his mind works as he's doing the things he does. Sydney is extremely underused, though, which... Well, I was going to say "which is a pity, because he's my favorite character," but it's probably just as well. Since the backstory he had in the series no longer works in the new time frame, they seem to have substituted in some utterly generic dead-wife-and-child tragedy in his past. Which I actually find really dismaying. To me, some of the most compelling things about the series were the twisted and poignant relationship between Sydney and Jarod, and the complex thematic issues it raises about nature vs. nurture, cycles of victimhood, and how a well-meaning man can find himself doing terrible things. Gut Syd's past, and I think you inevitably lose a lot of that. (Yes, I know. My compulsion to over-analyze TV shows makes me extremely difficult to satisfy.)

But even if it does okay with the main characters, disturbing changes to Sydney aside, the secondary characters are entirely two-dimensional, sometimes almost to the point of caricature. And, OK, that was often true of the bad-guy-character-of-the-week on the show, too, but somehow it's much more painfully obvious when you see it in writing. Also, for some unfathomable reason, they have chosen to add to the Jarod-hunting team a computer genius who is possibly the most obnoxious, annoying, stupidly written character I have seen in ages. I kept wishing they'd just kill him off so I didn't have to endure him anymore, and desperately, desperately missing Broots. (And why they didn't just include Broots instead, I have no idea. Yes, he wasn't in the pilot, but it's not like they didn't change a zillion other things, already.)

So, yeah. Mostly, this was a misguided idea, badly done. I have the urge to go watch a few episodes of the TV series now, in an attempt to get this version out of my head. ( )

I've been a fan of The Pretender since I watched the first episode, nearly thirteen years ago. After four TV seasons and two movies, it went into a forced hiatus ("NBC, where good shows go to die") until, finally, in 2013, the show's creators, Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle got their rights back and decided to give (re)birth to this universe.

"The Pretender - Rebirth" does not continue from where we were left on "Island of the Haunted", it goes back to the beginning and even further than that. Forget the old universe, but not completely - it's all still there, only twenty years into the future.

Using the layout of the pilot episode as the basis for this novel, Steve and Craig managed to surprise me constantly by letting me think I knew what was coming. This is a story full of twists - some of which are from scenes we have already seen on screen, others are not.

The "twenty year push" works well and was necessary to bring the show closer to a new number of fans. Aside from the technological aspects of the story (Jarod using an iPad instead of his traditional red notebooks and the modernized SIM-lab), the biggest update here was in terms of character development. Before reading this novel, I've read some reviews complaining the poor characterizations present here. Well, not to criticize a critic, but who knows the characters better than the people who created them? The actors gave wonderful performances, but they could never go inside their character's mind the way Steve and Craig can.

No doubt, we were left stranded with no official original Pretender content for far too many years. Perhaps because of that, some people now tend to view some characterizations of a softer Miss Parker as being the right one (just to mention one example). Either that or they forgot all about how Miss Parker used to be at the beginning of the show.

Still on the subject of characters, be ready for some surprises. Most of the old faces are still here and the new ones have definitely earned the right for more development in the upcoming novels.

In sum, "The Pretender - Rebirth" sets the bar high for what is coming next. It is a good novel, with plenty of action, well-plotted and nicely written. Whether you're an old fan (I'm not really old, just 33) of the show or you know nothing about it, you'll have a good time reading it. ( )