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3.33 AVERAGE
3.33 AVERAGE
I spend a lot of time thinking about the undead. I'm a writer, it's kind of what I do. I've written my share of Walking Dead fanfiction. I'm in the middle of compiling an extensive amount of folkloric history for a supernatural monster-of-the-week style series of short novellas. Of course, that's what made me stop to look at this book in the first place: yay, zombies!
I've dug through lots of folk tales about revenants and reanimated corpses. I've come to the personal conclusion that "zombie" is best kept for talking about the Vodoun concepts and the Haitian history. This book presents that history in truly chilling detail and I appreciate that. It's an excellent resource for talking about slavery and the history behind the ideas. What I'm disappointed in is that this book doesn't explain the actual roots of the mythology or folklore. It wraps the history up with saying the slaves felt like zombies or that they had their souls stripped from them. Yes, good, use that but the word already existed in their language to describe a legend. It's like saying they felt like ghosts without explaining that the word "ghost" means the disembodied spirit of a formerly living person.
Maybe I'm expecting too much out of a book for children, but I was genuinely disappointed at the lack of deeper exploration into the mythology and folklore behind the concept of the Vodoun zombi. It's a great starting point for discussions, especially on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean, but it leaves a lot to be desired on the actual subject of zombies.
I've dug through lots of folk tales about revenants and reanimated corpses. I've come to the personal conclusion that "zombie" is best kept for talking about the Vodoun concepts and the Haitian history. This book presents that history in truly chilling detail and I appreciate that. It's an excellent resource for talking about slavery and the history behind the ideas. What I'm disappointed in is that this book doesn't explain the actual roots of the mythology or folklore. It wraps the history up with saying the slaves felt like zombies or that they had their souls stripped from them. Yes, good, use that but the word already existed in their language to describe a legend. It's like saying they felt like ghosts without explaining that the word "ghost" means the disembodied spirit of a formerly living person.
Maybe I'm expecting too much out of a book for children, but I was genuinely disappointed at the lack of deeper exploration into the mythology and folklore behind the concept of the Vodoun zombi. It's a great starting point for discussions, especially on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean, but it leaves a lot to be desired on the actual subject of zombies.
informative
slow-paced