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3.91 AVERAGE
3.91 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
(In the absence of 1/2 * for ratings, I waffled on a 3 or 4 for this.)
This is a good not great book, but it will probably go down as a highlight of the recent zombie cultural interest. The author uses interviews of WWZ survivors - many years after the war - to elevate the story a bit beyond pure survivalism. That, and the upcoming movie, make this a timely and decent "guilty pleasure" read if the subject interests you.
This is a good not great book, but it will probably go down as a highlight of the recent zombie cultural interest. The author uses interviews of WWZ survivors - many years after the war - to elevate the story a bit beyond pure survivalism. That, and the upcoming movie, make this a timely and decent "guilty pleasure" read if the subject interests you.
Really well written, feeling like you're experiencing it alongside them. But it's just not my type of book
A guilty pleasure, I must say. A student of mine started reading it back in August but, being an 8th grader barely on grade level, he was quickly bored by all of the thinly veiled geopolitical wink-wink nod-nod references for which he lacked any context to understand. In that way, it's certainly not a book for kids, but not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. At any rate, I asked him if I could borrow it, and here I am almost five full months later finally writing up my review.
Brooks did an impressive job of casting a fully global net to create his many (many) story arcs, but that's also the reason I can't give this one anything more than a 3. To paraphrase any nauseating common-core debate you've ever heard, Brooks produces a ton of breadth throughout the novel -- in the first 44 pages alone he writes about seven virtually independent settings, each with virtually unrelated protagonists -- but never develops any sufficient depth with any of them. Of course, that's mostly due to the premise of the novel, which follows a mid-level United Nations commissioner traversing the post-Zombie War planet conducting interviews for a comprehensive report on the conflict. A nod to Brooks for the novelty of this premise.
Still, I kept wanting him to go deeper into some of these characters, or at least to create some tangible connections between the dozens of settings he visits. Not only did his failure to fully do that (he started to, especially at the end when he re-visited some of his initial settings) frustrate me as a reader, but it also led to a lot of his characters blending together and almost sounding like each other (even though one was, say, an elderly Japanese man and another, say, an Israeli intelligence operative). Maybe that was Brooks's point -- that an apocalypse is nothing if not a great equalizer. But maybe it was just tiresome to read after a while. Yeah.
OK, wait, I really did like this book. Lots of haunting moments, the most memorable of which being the interview with a girl from Wisconsin who drove north with her family during the onset of the zombie outbreak. Fleeing to the planet's polar regions was a popular strategy, apparently, but this soon proved to be as much of a problem as the zombies themselves were. Refugees were improperly equipped, supplies ran low, and human soon turned on human. A harrowing handful of pages, especially when one considers how easily a parallel situation could happen in the wake of a real-life disaster.
Top quotes (sorry, there are a lot):
"From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say 'They told me to do it!...' The freedom, God help us, to say 'I was only following orders.'" --Maria Zuganova, Lake Baikal, p.83
"It's fear, dude, just fear. And you don't have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn't about killing or even hurting the other guy, it's about scaring him enough to call it a day." --Todd Waino, Denver, p.103
"I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them." --an unnamed former American V.P., Vermont, p.151
"Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay. There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope." --Roy Elliot, Malibu, p.168
"I started limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my ass. It must have been comical, this frantic race of cripples." --Colonel Christina Eliopolis, Tennessee, p.182
"You carry those voices with you...Those cries will be with me the rest of my life, never resting, never fading, never ceasing their calls to join them." --unnamed Belgian radio operator, unable to respond to distress signals which were his responsibility to log, p.199
"What is it that Mr. Churchill used to say? 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.'" --Seryosha Garcia Alvarez, Cuba, p.233
"I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears." --Admiral Xu Zhicai, Beijing, p.249
"To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be." --Admiral Xu Zhicai, Beijing, p.252
"I don't care if the dead find me, but I care very little for the living." --Andre Renard, Quebec, p.309
"Amazing creatures, the California grays, and now they're all gone, along with the blues, and finbacks, and humpbacks, and rights...So the next time someone tries to tell you about how the true losses of this war are 'our innocence' or 'part of our humanity'...Whatever, bro. Tell it to the whales." --Michael Choi, aboard USS Tracy Bowden, p.340
Brooks did an impressive job of casting a fully global net to create his many (many) story arcs, but that's also the reason I can't give this one anything more than a 3. To paraphrase any nauseating common-core debate you've ever heard, Brooks produces a ton of breadth throughout the novel -- in the first 44 pages alone he writes about seven virtually independent settings, each with virtually unrelated protagonists -- but never develops any sufficient depth with any of them. Of course, that's mostly due to the premise of the novel, which follows a mid-level United Nations commissioner traversing the post-Zombie War planet conducting interviews for a comprehensive report on the conflict. A nod to Brooks for the novelty of this premise.
Still, I kept wanting him to go deeper into some of these characters, or at least to create some tangible connections between the dozens of settings he visits. Not only did his failure to fully do that (he started to, especially at the end when he re-visited some of his initial settings) frustrate me as a reader, but it also led to a lot of his characters blending together and almost sounding like each other (even though one was, say, an elderly Japanese man and another, say, an Israeli intelligence operative). Maybe that was Brooks's point -- that an apocalypse is nothing if not a great equalizer. But maybe it was just tiresome to read after a while. Yeah.
OK, wait, I really did like this book. Lots of haunting moments, the most memorable of which being the interview with a girl from Wisconsin who drove north with her family during the onset of the zombie outbreak. Fleeing to the planet's polar regions was a popular strategy, apparently, but this soon proved to be as much of a problem as the zombies themselves were. Refugees were improperly equipped, supplies ran low, and human soon turned on human. A harrowing handful of pages, especially when one considers how easily a parallel situation could happen in the wake of a real-life disaster.
Top quotes (sorry, there are a lot):
"From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say 'They told me to do it!...' The freedom, God help us, to say 'I was only following orders.'" --Maria Zuganova, Lake Baikal, p.83
"It's fear, dude, just fear. And you don't have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn't about killing or even hurting the other guy, it's about scaring him enough to call it a day." --Todd Waino, Denver, p.103
"I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them." --an unnamed former American V.P., Vermont, p.151
"Marty chose, instead, to show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay. There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope." --Roy Elliot, Malibu, p.168
"I started limping, splashing away with upwards of a hundred Gs on my ass. It must have been comical, this frantic race of cripples." --Colonel Christina Eliopolis, Tennessee, p.182
"You carry those voices with you...Those cries will be with me the rest of my life, never resting, never fading, never ceasing their calls to join them." --unnamed Belgian radio operator, unable to respond to distress signals which were his responsibility to log, p.199
"What is it that Mr. Churchill used to say? 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.'" --Seryosha Garcia Alvarez, Cuba, p.233
"I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears." --Admiral Xu Zhicai, Beijing, p.249
"To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be." --Admiral Xu Zhicai, Beijing, p.252
"I don't care if the dead find me, but I care very little for the living." --Andre Renard, Quebec, p.309
"Amazing creatures, the California grays, and now they're all gone, along with the blues, and finbacks, and humpbacks, and rights...So the next time someone tries to tell you about how the true losses of this war are 'our innocence' or 'part of our humanity'...Whatever, bro. Tell it to the whales." --Michael Choi, aboard USS Tracy Bowden, p.340
I read this book about once every 5 years and each time it feels relevant to the times. I guess humanity is that predictable.
Would have rated it a 5 but trump got us into war with while reading it so
--
originally read this book, couldn't finish it, but listened to audiobook w/ my husband in the car recently.
just as boring as the first time, i couldn't wait for it to be over. i tried to think of it as a series of short stories about the same event, which was essentially what it was, but i hated how monologue-y it felt.
originally read this book, couldn't finish it, but listened to audiobook w/ my husband in the car recently.
just as boring as the first time, i couldn't wait for it to be over. i tried to think of it as a series of short stories about the same event, which was essentially what it was, but i hated how monologue-y it felt.
awesome book. i liked the writing style and was surprised that i did because i don't really like too much non-fiction biography-like books. but i do love zombies. :)
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gore, Blood, War