Reviews

Mad World by Laura Lascarso

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farrington's review

bad writing also bad characters also kitten?????

This was not very good. I love zombie stories, but this can hardly be called one. There was hardly any tension and definitely not because the world-as-we-know-it ended. Any suspense or tension that did occur was VERY quickly resolved. If you want something really low stakes, low angst, low anything, this book is it. At least it’s fast-paced, so there’s not much to finishing it.

It read much more YA than NA, with one pretty unrealistically cutesy/innocent (childish) MC, while the other was cartoonishly “tough”. Unfortunately, the childish, naïve (kid-like!!) MC was also very overly sexual and sexualised, which was awkward and uncomfortable to read. As some of the other reviews have said, this seems like a sanitised Fallocaust, badly executed. The side characters might as well have been left out of this completely, for all the impact they made?

I don’t think there’s anyone I’d recommend this to, really

adammm's review

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3.0

2.5 rounded... idk, up? Maybe down?

You know how sometimes you finish a book, and in retrospect it just gets better and better? Yeah, that's not the case with Mad World by Laura Lascarso. A brief synopsis: in a world in which 90% of the population has died or turned to zombies, a small band of teenagers heading south to the Promised Land (capital letters come straight from the book) comes across a boy who acts as if the zombie apocalypse has not occurred. They meet, zombies happen, shenanigans ensue.

Mad World starts very strong - with the exact premise I wrote above. The road trip to a "better place" (here the somewhat unimaginatively named "Promised Land") is an incredibly common trope in post-apocalyptic novels, and in recent years I've noticed it being present in virtually all zombie novels. The thing is, this book steadily goes downhill as soon as they leave Joshua (Kitten)'s home and make their way to Promised Land. I had trouble articulating my thoughts while reading/immediately upon completing the novel, but I think I have pinpointed the big issue: for a book taking place in the zombie apocalypse, it sorely lacks action. Sure, the characters come across raiders, the occasional zombie, and even wildlife (more on that in a moment), but the stakes just don't feel very high. Everything that they have to lose - family members, body parts, the modern world itself - is missing within the first thirty pages. And even the modern world is not really lost - when they reach a certain destination they discover that restaurants and Coca Cola factories are still functioning! Like, what? And yeah, sure, you could argue that they could lose their lives, but that's not something to worry about if they're never in danger. In other words, the plot is a big nothing.

The next issue I have is identifying the audience for this book. Who is it? Is this book YA? A romance? There are waaay too many spicy scenes for this to be YA, but in many ways, the characters make this read like YA. The characters are actually my next concern (annoyance? Frustration?), so let's move onto that. The characters are all roughly 15-19 years old; the protagonists Cipher and Kitten are 19 and 17 (and then 18) respectively. Killer teenagers is not an unusual conceit in YA fiction, so I don't mind that. Half the characters are honestly kind of useless (why is Gizmo there? What's the point of Teresa besides being a traumatized female version of Kitten?), and the protagonists are... not much better. My biggest issue is that Kitten reads as incredibly immature and young, but a very oversexualized young. He can't possibly take care of himself; he is too innocent and pure for this world; because he grew up sheltered he doesn't understand The Real World - I'm paraphrasing the text right now. Since he has been so sheltered he has next to no sexual experience, knowledge, or even a means to gain said knowledge. Despite this, he flirts with Cipher, initiates sex (frequently), and reads as weirdly sexually mature. To be quite honest: I don't feel comfortable reading about this character. Very icky vibes. Someone in the editing process needed to tell the author to drop the sheltered thing or age everyone up a few years.

Finally - and I haven't seen anyone else talking about this, so maybe it's just me - this book reads weirdly similar to All That's Left in the World by Erik J. Brown. Two teenage boys meet in the apocalypse (one stumbling upon the other's very nicely outfitted home); they go on a road trip to some sort of promised land in the southeast US; and perhaps most egregiously, they stumble across a form of wildlife that is not, shall we say, native to the US. I may be reaching here, but Mad World kinda reads like a poor man's version of ATLITW and that bothers me.

I have some other complaints about this book, but I think I'll just end here. The book has a lot of wasted potential and some very strange plotting/characterization choices that really mess up the book for me. I don't think I'll read more in this series, but based on the strength of the first sixty-ish pages I'm open to reading more by this author. I don't think I recommend this book, but I do recommend ATLITW.