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billymac1962 's review for:
The Reapers Are the Angels
by Alden Bell
I see a lot of reviews that compare this novel to The Road. I guess that's valid, but I couldn't make it past a dozen pages of that one. I can take bleak, but The Road just seemed to smother me with it.
The Reapers are the Angels is also about as bleak as you can get, but pressing through this is, at times, wonderful writing, and a very good story. There is no use of quotation marks, which for some reason at the beginning I found a bit pretentious...you know, the old style over substance thing, but this feeling slipped away quite easily as I got immersed into the story.
The story follows Temple, a 15 year-old girl who fights for survival after a zombie (oh dear, I've lost some of you now, haven't I?) apocalypse. This is America 25 years after the dead first began to rise.
Now I know what you're thinking. Another zombie book? I know, I thought the same thing. But reviews here by my friends convinced me to give it a shot, and it's a short novel, so not a big time commitment. So this only took me a week to read (would have been quicker if not for real life, real life not post-apocalyptic, thank God), but the after effects of the novel will linger for much longer than that.
While in the midst of the story, I was figuring on giving this a 3-star rating, only because it didn't have that can't-wait-to-get-back-to-it quality. The last quarter of the book had such a strong impact on me, though, that this quickly shot up to a solid 4-star read. Now as I'm typing this, several hours after finishing it, I am still left with images and feelings that I can't quite shake. THIS is really getting close to the 5-star awesome rating.
I'm giving it a very solid 4.5 stars.
The Reapers are the Angels is also about as bleak as you can get, but pressing through this is, at times, wonderful writing, and a very good story. There is no use of quotation marks, which for some reason at the beginning I found a bit pretentious...you know, the old style over substance thing, but this feeling slipped away quite easily as I got immersed into the story.
The story follows Temple, a 15 year-old girl who fights for survival after a zombie (oh dear, I've lost some of you now, haven't I?) apocalypse. This is America 25 years after the dead first began to rise.
Now I know what you're thinking. Another zombie book? I know, I thought the same thing. But reviews here by my friends convinced me to give it a shot, and it's a short novel, so not a big time commitment. So this only took me a week to read (would have been quicker if not for real life, real life not post-apocalyptic, thank God), but the after effects of the novel will linger for much longer than that.
While in the midst of the story, I was figuring on giving this a 3-star rating, only because it didn't have that can't-wait-to-get-back-to-it quality. The last quarter of the book had such a strong impact on me, though, that this quickly shot up to a solid 4-star read. Now as I'm typing this, several hours after finishing it, I am still left with images and feelings that I can't quite shake. THIS is really getting close to the 5-star awesome rating.
I'm giving it a very solid 4.5 stars.