A review by ttmusic
Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel

4.0

First off, it did NOT take me nearly a month to read this book. I started it back at the end of February, but only got a few chapters in before I realized I needed to read Article 5 before Kristen Simmons came to town. I also started working a part-time job, which took up a lot of my previous reading time. Although, part of the reason it did take me a while to read this book was because of the way it was structured. Each chapter is in a different character’s point of view, which was fine when switching between Nora and Bram, or switching to what Pamela was up to, but for some reason every time we got a chapter from Victor’s POV I was totally lost. Wolfe too. When I finally had time to sit and read for more than 15-30 minutes (yay spring break!), I ended up really liking the book. I had legitimate tears on my face towards the end. The characters were well formed, I freaking loved Pamela, and their actions were believable to me. Nora’s reaction to the friendly undead got to be annoying after a while, but understandable. I mean, if you’d never heard of zombies and suddenly realized you were surrounded by friendly ones, you might freak out too. The history of the world of the series was quite interesting to me, and how Habel was somehow able to combine elements of steampunk, futuristic technology, zombies, and the Victorian era, and throw them all into a post-apocalyptic future was fascinating. Overall, once I really sat down and got into the book, it was hard to put down. Just set aside larger chunks of time in which to read if you plan to read this one, and you won’t be disappointed!