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jaironside's review against another edition
3.0
Enjoyable enough but underwhelming when compared to Alison Hewitt is Trapped. It's set in the same world and Alison, who we know and love from the previous book, gets a mention or two but this is really Sadie's story. Unfortunately Sadie is a lot of promise that never really delivers. She has knowledge of outdoor pursuits and survival skills but doesn't use them. She creates a bow and arrows which work effectively and then doesn't use them. She stands by very puzzled as the ten little Indians stuff is going on and she's pretty sure she knows where it's coming from but doesn't act. It's really frustrating. Meanwhile her fluctuating hormones over two potential male companions when she swears all she wants to do is look after her nephew is just baffling.
My biggest niggle is that none of the other characters are fully rounded. I'm sure the author was trying to make us suspect everyone, instead they all came across as flat and not very engaging. When the grand reveal occurred it wasn't a surprise - I'd been waiting for it for at least thirty pages.
So a lot of annoying stuff. However this is still a good read and a pretty engaging survival story. Sadie's voice keeps you reading and if the plot is a bit jerky and uncoordinated with sub plots that go nowhere - well you could always be losing brain cells watching the x-factor. Seriously if you like a good survivor/ zombie novel this has plenty to keep you entertained. I would just have liked a bit more plot and character development especially on the 'rabbits' but perhaps we can hope for that in book three?
My biggest niggle is that none of the other characters are fully rounded. I'm sure the author was trying to make us suspect everyone, instead they all came across as flat and not very engaging. When the grand reveal occurred it wasn't a surprise - I'd been waiting for it for at least thirty pages.
So a lot of annoying stuff. However this is still a good read and a pretty engaging survival story. Sadie's voice keeps you reading and if the plot is a bit jerky and uncoordinated with sub plots that go nowhere - well you could always be losing brain cells watching the x-factor. Seriously if you like a good survivor/ zombie novel this has plenty to keep you entertained. I would just have liked a bit more plot and character development especially on the 'rabbits' but perhaps we can hope for that in book three?
catevari's review against another edition
2.0
What a disappointing book.
I think it would've been disappointing in any case, but as a follow up to Allison Hewitt is Trapped, it feels even more so. The flaws in Roux's writing carry over from the first book—a poor sense of visual and spatial orientation that becomes especially confusing/egregious in the action scenes that are the byproduct of any zombie story—but they're added to by new storytelling and stylistic problems.
The first problem is largely one of POV. Both Allison Hewit and Sadie Walker are told from first person POV, which limits what we see and know, as the readers, to what our protagonist tells us that they see and know. It's always a balancing act for an author because, in real life, we are not generally narrating our own adventures to ourselves or consciously cataloguing what we see…but in a story being told to us, we definitely need that kind of narration to understand what's happening. Tell too little and your reader doesn't know what's going on. Tell too much and you lose that feeling of being inside the character, inside their story…and thus you lose the audience. Roux definitely errs on the side of not describing much at all. We only have the vaguest ideas of what characters look like. We only have the vaguest idea of what their environment looks like or what Allison or Sadie see as they move through that environment. This becomes most noticeable in scenes of zombie attacks, where it feels most like being in a remote HQ having events narrated over a microphone by an operator that's under fire. I can grasp outcomes, but I have no real sense of what's actually happening on the ground. And, since zombies don't really communicate through witty banter or other dialogue, this lack of a visual component becomes critical.
I feel like it was worse in Sadie Walker because Allison Hewitt took place in relatively familiar locales: a bookstore, a city apartment, a college gymnasium, while the majority of events in Sadie Walker take place on a remote island in the Pacific NW. When you think of deserted island stories, they're largely tropical in nature, but those visual referents don't work for Sadie's environment and the lack of in-story referents made it all very hard to picture.
Similarly, both books lack a concrete sense of time's passage. In Allison Hewitt, there were at least dates on her blog entries that could be tied to the narrative, but Sadie Walker, again, lacks any similar navigation marks, which contributes to the vague sense of I don't know what's going on.
And then, more—or maybe most—damning, the character of Sadie is so much more self-absorbed and internal than Allison that it places a still greater limitation on what the reader sees. Allison had so much more interaction with the other characters in her story and, as a result, those characters felt more fleshed out and real. Whereas Sadie is so focused on herself—and sometimes Shane—that everyone else felt flat and shallow and undeveloped, despite the fact that, by the end of the story, they've spent months together. Shane and Andrea, the only other characters besides Sadie who are present pretty much from the book's start, are no clearer or more developed at the end of the book than they were when they were introduced. The only things I really know about Nate is that he's Black and a good shot with a gun. We hear a lot about Whelan's dimple and killer smile, but not really anything about who Whelan is, why Whelan is.
Of course, another thing that made this book so much more inaccessible and so much less enjoyable is that I don't really know anything about who Sadie is, from front to back. With Allison, I didn't always necessarily agree with the decisions she made through the course of the story, but they felt realistic (which, by far, was my favorite aspect of the book), consistent and understandable. Sadie, on the other hand, seems to blow in a different direction from chapter to chapter, with no reliable through line to make her actions make sense, let alone understandable.
At least some small part of this I feel is a lack of history on Sadie's (or anyone's) part. Roux tries to handwave Sadie's (or anyone's) personal history with mental and social admonitions not to talk about or dwell on the past, an explanation that wants to make sense, but a) in-story: people think about their pasts whether they really want to or not, and with as much time as Sadie spends in her own head, it doesn't make sense that her past wouldn't come up with everything else and b) out-story: the lack of any kind of history or reference to people's previous lives makes it feel like they just didn't exist before Roux started telling this story.
With Allison, a big part of her story was her relationship with her mom, being trapped with her co-workers and how the fractiousness of those work relationships then translated when they were dependent on each other for survival, in Allison's internet and scholarly pursuits before the zombie apocalypse. Allison was a character who very much felt grounded in the real world and that made her an empathetic and realistic heroine.
Sadie, on the other hand, references her sister, Shane's mom, and her previous career as an illustrator, but it feels like character stats on a page, rather than a living, breathing life that Sadie once had. We don't really know anything about Sadie & Kat's relationship, whether they were fractious sisters or best friends; I don't think Kat's husband even ever gets a name, let alone how Sadie related to him. We don't hear or know of Sadie having any friends or lovers from before the Outbreak. And from the way she relates to and talks about Shane, it doesn't really give the impression that she'd ever even met Shane before Kat & her husband died and Sadie inherited him. And while I can handwave some of this with the fact that Sadie is incredibly awkward with people and may have always been, part of being able to buy in to a fictional character is in believing in the character, in believing in the way they fit into their world. But there's no sense of that in Sadie and even less so in the less developed secondary characters.
Another big problem for me was just the plot itself.One of the things that made Allison Hewitt so unique and interesting compared to its peers was a sense/feeling of real world practicality. If Allison wasn't a badass military pro like Alice, from the Resident Evil movies, neither was she an unrealistic naïf who had somehow grown to adulthood completely insulated from pop culture and/or references to zombies. She was very much an everywoman hero with (again) those all important ties back to a more real world existence.
On the one hand, I think Sadie is intended to be a similarly everywoman type character, but, at one point in the reading, I groaned to myself, "Oh, God. This is the Six Days, Seven Nights of zombie novels!" That is, there's definite a romantic comedy element to the relationship between Sadie and Whelan, from the meet-cute of Sadie saving Whelan's life, only to be injured herself to the awkward bantering and the need for Whelan to keep Sadie from further injuring herself (largely by picking her up bodily and carrying her around, which usually ends on a meditation on Whelan's ass), to the daring, last-minute rescues of the book's end. Sometimes it's cute, sometimes it's really incongruous, the elements of one genre shoved inexpertly into another. Most damning, I think, is just that it's largely really cliché, something else that Allison Hewitt definitely was not. To go from something that felt so refreshing and original to this cliché riddled fest…it was disappointing.
These days, I feel very weird and uncomfortable about pulling out the term "Mary-Sue", for a number of reasons—too many to go into, especially with as much as I have to say about the book itself—but Sadie definitely shares a number of qualities that I associate (badly) with the idea of a Mary-Sue, including her 'endearing' physical awkwardness and the fact that nearly every man she came in contact with fell for her.
Since Moritz and Noah never really declared their emotions/intentions, I suppose it's arguable whether they were really in love with Sadie, but with Moritz, the degree of attention he paid to Sadie (his one defining characteristic seemed to be "Stares At Sadie a Lot") definitely suggested it and while Noah was more opaque, the fact that he gave her the only possessions of value he owned (his books) and sacrificed his life basically because Sadie didn't believe in him definitely suggests a deeper than friendship bond. In any case, the incredible stupidity of a lot of her actions combined with her mercurial mood changes makes a girl wonder what's in Sadie's milkshake that it, even so, brings all the boys to the (zombie filled) yard.
Even after Sadie has drugged the entire camp and left them helpless against the zombies they KNOW are roaming the forest, no one even seems all that upset when Sadie shows up behind the fair, after the camp has been overrun and the remaining campers are in dire danger of their life. I can't emphasize this moment in the story enough, because it's when a story that had issues but was still chugging along tolerably became a complete disaster; a sow's ear I could not, no matter how hard I tried, make a silk purse.
From the way it's written, I feel like we're supposed to find this part of the story more understandable and more forgivable than it is. I get that Sadie's betrayal by Carl, in the first chapters of the book, is supposed to be the catalyzing event that fuels her paranoiac distrust through the rest of the book. Though I appreciate Roux not hammering us over the head with it, I do think she could've lampshaded that a little more, but I will accept that motivation as valid on Sadie's part.
However, by the time that Sadie abandons the camp to strike out on her own (with Shane), it ceases to be a meaningful motivation. Even if I accept that Sadie was willing to betray Moritz, Whelan, Nate and Banana in this way (I'll give her a pass on Stefano, they never got along), I find it incredibly difficult to swallow that she'd be willing to abandon Andrea so coldly. The fact that she feels betrayed by Andrea not revealing that the campers had once been Repops is not, under any circumstances, sufficient motivation for Sadie to leave Andrea (and the others) to die. And, whatever Sadie might have thought she was doing or that Roux wanted us to believe about what Sadie was doing, that's what Sadie did: she left every living person in the world she knew, every person who had offered her and Shane assistance, shelter and food along the way, people who have repeatedly saved her (and Shane's) life drugged and helpless in a place she knew was regularly infested with zombies. That's not just a tantrum or a flounce or one of those crazy communication mix-ups that happen in rom-coms, that's a murder attempt. And Sadie is old enough and intelligent enough that her failure or refusal to think that out (let alone to take off at the onset of winter in the middle of a zombie apocalypse with no weapons, help or safe destination in mind) is just unforgivable. Bordering on sociopathy.
The thing is, Sadie is our POV character. In some sense of the word, she's supposed to be the character we care about. And, in the rom-com Sadie seems to have wandered out of, maybe her hysterical, high-drama behavior and changes of mood, maybe—maybe—that would be the case. But to transpose a character like Sadie into the middle of a zombie apocalypse, it's not even remotely endearing. It's stupid and childishly irrational and it's dangerous and the degree to which it made Sadie unlikeable—intolerable—cannot be measured.
And, again, I think I would have disliked Sadie for these reasons no matter what, but after having watched Roux adroitly avoid these pitfalls in Allison Hewitt, it's doubly aggravating to see her fall right into them in her second outing, a book I was looking forward to with great anticipation.
Speaking of clichés and pitfalls: the mentally ill person as the villain. On the one hand, I think Roux was trying to do something interesting with the idea that Cassandra had died and been revived and so…what? It comes so late in the book and with so little information that it's not even completely clear what she was trying to do with Cassandra. Cassandra's craziness could've been mental illness or it could've been just her mind breaking under the stress. Was she partly zombified by her temporary death or was it just that she could pass unnoticed by the zombies? If it was only that she could remain unnoticed, how/why did it seem like the zombies were being directed by her? How exactly was this "family" that she was going to put together going to work? Was her goal just to zombify everyone? None of this was clear or, to my mind, very well thought out. And, since this is the character and the events that the entire story hinges on, it all doesn't hang together especially well.
It's less clear to me at this point, but I seem to remember in Allison Hewitt, Roux broached the idea of people who are dependent on medications and how, in a zombie apocalypse, they're pretty much screwed. If she didn't mention it herself, it was definitely a line of thought I had while reading it. So I think there was an interesting story to be told there, if Roux was going to invoke the mentally ill, one other than the much overused "crazy villain". Given the difficulty of being a mentally ill person in that environment, I could have even gone for Cassandra as the crazy villain if Roux had bothered to develop her out of the cardboard cliché…but she didn't.
Ultimately, I think Sadie Walker is a book that tries to do too many things at once and doesn't really succeed with any of them. The story of an aunt presented with unwilling custody coming to terms with custody of her nephew, the rom-com love story (with zombies!) between Sadie and Whelan, the stranded on a desert island (with zombies!) story, the locked room murder mystery story, trapped at sea without a captain story, Cassandra the Zombie Queen…any one of these stories feels like it could have been big enough to expand into its own novel, but crammed all together, none of them has the space or time to expand to fullness, and so they feel more like outlines, tired tropes and wasted potential than anything else.
I think it would've been disappointing in any case, but as a follow up to Allison Hewitt is Trapped, it feels even more so. The flaws in Roux's writing carry over from the first book—a poor sense of visual and spatial orientation that becomes especially confusing/egregious in the action scenes that are the byproduct of any zombie story—but they're added to by new storytelling and stylistic problems.
The first problem is largely one of POV. Both Allison Hewit and Sadie Walker are told from first person POV, which limits what we see and know, as the readers, to what our protagonist tells us that they see and know. It's always a balancing act for an author because, in real life, we are not generally narrating our own adventures to ourselves or consciously cataloguing what we see…but in a story being told to us, we definitely need that kind of narration to understand what's happening. Tell too little and your reader doesn't know what's going on. Tell too much and you lose that feeling of being inside the character, inside their story…and thus you lose the audience. Roux definitely errs on the side of not describing much at all. We only have the vaguest ideas of what characters look like. We only have the vaguest idea of what their environment looks like or what Allison or Sadie see as they move through that environment. This becomes most noticeable in scenes of zombie attacks, where it feels most like being in a remote HQ having events narrated over a microphone by an operator that's under fire. I can grasp outcomes, but I have no real sense of what's actually happening on the ground. And, since zombies don't really communicate through witty banter or other dialogue, this lack of a visual component becomes critical.
I feel like it was worse in Sadie Walker because Allison Hewitt took place in relatively familiar locales: a bookstore, a city apartment, a college gymnasium, while the majority of events in Sadie Walker take place on a remote island in the Pacific NW. When you think of deserted island stories, they're largely tropical in nature, but those visual referents don't work for Sadie's environment and the lack of in-story referents made it all very hard to picture.
Similarly, both books lack a concrete sense of time's passage. In Allison Hewitt, there were at least dates on her blog entries that could be tied to the narrative, but Sadie Walker, again, lacks any similar navigation marks, which contributes to the vague sense of I don't know what's going on.
And then, more—or maybe most—damning, the character of Sadie is so much more self-absorbed and internal than Allison that it places a still greater limitation on what the reader sees. Allison had so much more interaction with the other characters in her story and, as a result, those characters felt more fleshed out and real. Whereas Sadie is so focused on herself—and sometimes Shane—that everyone else felt flat and shallow and undeveloped, despite the fact that, by the end of the story, they've spent months together. Shane and Andrea, the only other characters besides Sadie who are present pretty much from the book's start, are no clearer or more developed at the end of the book than they were when they were introduced. The only things I really know about Nate is that he's Black and a good shot with a gun. We hear a lot about Whelan's dimple and killer smile, but not really anything about who Whelan is, why Whelan is.
Of course, another thing that made this book so much more inaccessible and so much less enjoyable is that I don't really know anything about who Sadie is, from front to back. With Allison, I didn't always necessarily agree with the decisions she made through the course of the story, but they felt realistic (which, by far, was my favorite aspect of the book), consistent and understandable. Sadie, on the other hand, seems to blow in a different direction from chapter to chapter, with no reliable through line to make her actions make sense, let alone understandable.
At least some small part of this I feel is a lack of history on Sadie's (or anyone's) part. Roux tries to handwave Sadie's (or anyone's) personal history with mental and social admonitions not to talk about or dwell on the past, an explanation that wants to make sense, but a) in-story: people think about their pasts whether they really want to or not, and with as much time as Sadie spends in her own head, it doesn't make sense that her past wouldn't come up with everything else and b) out-story: the lack of any kind of history or reference to people's previous lives makes it feel like they just didn't exist before Roux started telling this story.
With Allison, a big part of her story was her relationship with her mom, being trapped with her co-workers and how the fractiousness of those work relationships then translated when they were dependent on each other for survival, in Allison's internet and scholarly pursuits before the zombie apocalypse. Allison was a character who very much felt grounded in the real world and that made her an empathetic and realistic heroine.
Sadie, on the other hand, references her sister, Shane's mom, and her previous career as an illustrator, but it feels like character stats on a page, rather than a living, breathing life that Sadie once had. We don't really know anything about Sadie & Kat's relationship, whether they were fractious sisters or best friends; I don't think Kat's husband even ever gets a name, let alone how Sadie related to him. We don't hear or know of Sadie having any friends or lovers from before the Outbreak. And from the way she relates to and talks about Shane, it doesn't really give the impression that she'd ever even met Shane before Kat & her husband died and Sadie inherited him. And while I can handwave some of this with the fact that Sadie is incredibly awkward with people and may have always been, part of being able to buy in to a fictional character is in believing in the character, in believing in the way they fit into their world. But there's no sense of that in Sadie and even less so in the less developed secondary characters.
Another big problem for me was just the plot itself.
On the one hand, I think Sadie is intended to be a similarly everywoman type character, but, at one point in the reading, I groaned to myself, "Oh, God. This is the Six Days, Seven Nights of zombie novels!" That is, there's definite a romantic comedy element to the relationship between Sadie and Whelan, from the meet-cute of Sadie saving Whelan's life, only to be injured herself to the awkward bantering and the need for Whelan to keep Sadie from further injuring herself (largely by picking her up bodily and carrying her around, which usually ends on a meditation on Whelan's ass), to the daring, last-minute rescues of the book's end. Sometimes it's cute, sometimes it's really incongruous, the elements of one genre shoved inexpertly into another. Most damning, I think, is just that it's largely really cliché, something else that Allison Hewitt definitely was not. To go from something that felt so refreshing and original to this cliché riddled fest…it was disappointing.
These days, I feel very weird and uncomfortable about pulling out the term "Mary-Sue", for a number of reasons—too many to go into, especially with as much as I have to say about the book itself—but Sadie definitely shares a number of qualities that I associate (badly) with the idea of a Mary-Sue, including her 'endearing' physical awkwardness and the fact that nearly every man she came in contact with fell for her.
Since Moritz and Noah never really declared their emotions/intentions, I suppose it's arguable whether they were really in love with Sadie, but with Moritz, the degree of attention he paid to Sadie (his one defining characteristic seemed to be "Stares At Sadie a Lot") definitely suggested it and while Noah was more opaque, the fact that he gave her the only possessions of value he owned (his books) and sacrificed his life basically because Sadie didn't believe in him definitely suggests a deeper than friendship bond. In any case, the incredible stupidity of a lot of her actions combined with her mercurial mood changes makes a girl wonder what's in Sadie's milkshake that it, even so, brings all the boys to the (zombie filled) yard.
Even after Sadie has drugged the entire camp and left them helpless against the zombies they KNOW are roaming the forest, no one even seems all that upset when Sadie shows up behind the fair, after the camp has been overrun and the remaining campers are in dire danger of their life. I can't emphasize this moment in the story enough, because it's when a story that had issues but was still chugging along tolerably became a complete disaster; a sow's ear I could not, no matter how hard I tried, make a silk purse.
From the way it's written, I feel like we're supposed to find this part of the story more understandable and more forgivable than it is. I get that Sadie's betrayal by Carl, in the first chapters of the book, is supposed to be the catalyzing event that fuels her paranoiac distrust through the rest of the book. Though I appreciate Roux not hammering us over the head with it, I do think she could've lampshaded that a little more, but I will accept that motivation as valid on Sadie's part.
However, by the time that Sadie abandons the camp to strike out on her own (with Shane), it ceases to be a meaningful motivation. Even if I accept that Sadie was willing to betray Moritz, Whelan, Nate and Banana in this way (I'll give her a pass on Stefano, they never got along), I find it incredibly difficult to swallow that she'd be willing to abandon Andrea so coldly. The fact that she feels betrayed by Andrea not revealing that the campers had once been Repops is not, under any circumstances, sufficient motivation for Sadie to leave Andrea (and the others) to die. And, whatever Sadie might have thought she was doing or that Roux wanted us to believe about what Sadie was doing, that's what Sadie did: she left every living person in the world she knew, every person who had offered her and Shane assistance, shelter and food along the way, people who have repeatedly saved her (and Shane's) life drugged and helpless in a place she knew was regularly infested with zombies. That's not just a tantrum or a flounce or one of those crazy communication mix-ups that happen in rom-coms, that's a murder attempt. And Sadie is old enough and intelligent enough that her failure or refusal to think that out (let alone to take off at the onset of winter in the middle of a zombie apocalypse with no weapons, help or safe destination in mind) is just unforgivable. Bordering on sociopathy.
The thing is, Sadie is our POV character. In some sense of the word, she's supposed to be the character we care about. And, in the rom-com Sadie seems to have wandered out of, maybe her hysterical, high-drama behavior and changes of mood, maybe—maybe—that would be the case. But to transpose a character like Sadie into the middle of a zombie apocalypse, it's not even remotely endearing. It's stupid and childishly irrational and it's dangerous and the degree to which it made Sadie unlikeable—intolerable—cannot be measured.
And, again, I think I would have disliked Sadie for these reasons no matter what, but after having watched Roux adroitly avoid these pitfalls in Allison Hewitt, it's doubly aggravating to see her fall right into them in her second outing, a book I was looking forward to with great anticipation.
Speaking of clichés and pitfalls: the mentally ill person as the villain. On the one hand, I think Roux was trying to do something interesting with the idea that Cassandra had died and been revived and so…what? It comes so late in the book and with so little information that it's not even completely clear what she was trying to do with Cassandra. Cassandra's craziness could've been mental illness or it could've been just her mind breaking under the stress. Was she partly zombified by her temporary death or was it just that she could pass unnoticed by the zombies? If it was only that she could remain unnoticed, how/why did it seem like the zombies were being directed by her? How exactly was this "family" that she was going to put together going to work? Was her goal just to zombify everyone? None of this was clear or, to my mind, very well thought out. And, since this is the character and the events that the entire story hinges on, it all doesn't hang together especially well.
It's less clear to me at this point, but I seem to remember in Allison Hewitt, Roux broached the idea of people who are dependent on medications and how, in a zombie apocalypse, they're pretty much screwed. If she didn't mention it herself, it was definitely a line of thought I had while reading it. So I think there was an interesting story to be told there, if Roux was going to invoke the mentally ill, one other than the much overused "crazy villain". Given the difficulty of being a mentally ill person in that environment, I could have even gone for Cassandra as the crazy villain if Roux had bothered to develop her out of the cardboard cliché…but she didn't.
Ultimately, I think Sadie Walker is a book that tries to do too many things at once and doesn't really succeed with any of them. The story of an aunt presented with unwilling custody coming to terms with custody of her nephew, the rom-com love story (with zombies!) between Sadie and Whelan, the stranded on a desert island (with zombies!) story, the locked room murder mystery story, trapped at sea without a captain story, Cassandra the Zombie Queen…any one of these stories feels like it could have been big enough to expand into its own novel, but crammed all together, none of them has the space or time to expand to fullness, and so they feel more like outlines, tired tropes and wasted potential than anything else.
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