Details:
Pages: 416
Edition: Kindle
Price: $8.54 on Amazon
Publisher/Date: Harlequin Teen (September 25, 2012)
★★★★★★★★☆☆
Note: I've been bad. I spent the past week or so slaving away on Halloween costumes (I really get into Halloween), so I kept putting this review off for later. Now, I've let it sit for too long and I know I can't do the book justice. This is a fantastic book! If my enthusiasm seems lackluster, it's my own damn fault. READ THIS BOOK. IT'S GOOD!
Don’t judge a book by its title – especially when that book is Alice in Zombieland. The title lacked creativity, and, because of that, I started reading expecting nothing more than another stereotypical YA zombie novel. Within a few pages, I realized this was so much more.
We all know the stereotypical zombies – rotting, mindless, animated corpses jerking around in search of “braaaaiiiiiinssss.” Most commonly, zombies are created through a virus or some sort of biological disaster (bonus points for government cleanup) and spread through bodily fluids (primarily biting and scratching). Did I really need to say that? Probably not.
[pullquote align="right"]"At night, these living dead, these...zombies...rise from their graves, and they crave what they lost. Life. They will infect you. And then they will kill you." - A Note From Alice[/pullquote]
In the preface, “A Note From Alice,” Alice reflects on her own story. Things she would’ve done different – an apology to her family. It also introduces a concept of zombies that breaks from the clichés I’ve come to expect in books of this genre (Another excellent example is Lia Habel’s Dearly, Departed). Instead of feeding on human flesh for sustenance (or, in particularly crappy cases, no reason at all), Alice’s zombies feed on emotions. It’s something I’d never considered before, but it makes a ridiculous amount of sense. What would the undead crave more than life?
I won’t go into too much detail about the zombies, partially because it would ruin some of the plot, and also because they’re not that easy to explain. The characters in the book do a much better job than I will.
Overall, I loved the plot. Alice’s life hasn’t exactly been normal. Reclusive and an alcoholic, her dad was obsessed with protecting his family from monsters he said came out at night—which meant sleepovers or school functions conducted after nightfall. She thought he was crazy, but that begins to change the night of her 16 th birthday when she’s involved in a car crash that kills her parents and little sister. That night, she saw something—some things —attacking her father’s unconscious body after he was thrown from the car.
Alice goes to live with her maternal grandparents, who are nice but know little about raising a teenager. Although she now has a best friend (a girl named Kat who Alice had met in the hospital right after the accident) and some semblance of a normal teenage life, she’s troubled by the things she saw the night of the accident.
Of course, no YA novel would be complete without a love interest—especially a “bad boy” love interest. In Alice, this role goes to Cole. Cole and his clique of bad boys (and two girls) are a mystery. No one knows much about what they do, but they know not to mess with them. That would be easier if Alice didn’t see flashes of them together whenever she saw him.
And that’s all I’m saying because any more would be a spoiler.
I was trying to put together the highlights of the book – things or characters I especially liked –but I couldn’t. Not because anything was bad, but because they were all good and they worked so well together.
The characters were interesting. I could sympathize with Alice, laugh at crazy Kat and totally understood the attraction to Cole. The minor characters supported the overall story, creating some conflict but not drawing attention away from the main plot.
The ending was...sufficient? It’s not that I didn’t like it, but it was a little predictable. Not horrible, though.
I’m totally looking forward to the next in the series, which comes out sometime next year (a.k.a. not soon enough).
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