Zombie Love The Outbreak by Eric J. Sobolik

Quoted from GoodReads:
"Zombie Love is the story of a widespread virus, in a way that has never been done before. As people lose loved ones, some decide that sometimes the people you love are the only ones worth fighting for. As factions form, and the world crumbles, people must choose sides. Help or destroy. When a virus is developed as the ultimate cure all by reversing death itself, the world is plunged into a crisis of faith, dedication, and love. In book one we meet Summer Strom, a normal high school teenager who is thrown cruelly into a set of circumstances that nobody should have to deal with. She has to fight back against everybody she knows as she battles for the only thing worth fighting for. Love."
Paperback, 188 pages
Published August 8th 2011 by Jericho Publishing (first published August 6th 2011)
ISBN 061552396X (ISBN13: 9780615523965)

Cover Art: The cover is a little freaky...I think the zombie eyes and open mouth are very creepy looking, but what should I expect from a zombie story?  Zombie lovers will definitively appreciate it!

This book is a very fun, quick read.  The margins are very large and it gives the pages a unique look.  I think that someone who is not a "reader" might find this style less threatening than a full page of text and it just may encourage some adolescents to give it a try.  I'm all about getting more kids to read, so for me this was a great bonus.

The story is well written.  It has appropriate grammar and sentence structure. It is written in the third person, which for me, gives a book a less intimate feeling.  Although you know what the characters are thinking, I think reading it in the third person, puts a certain amount of emotional distance between the reader and the characters.

The writing is descriptive without feeling forced and it flows along well, although it does backtrack at times as the narrator changes.  This wasn't a bad thing, just different.  The pace is good and the plot is interesting.  The narrator changes through the book and I found this a little distracting at times, because I wasn't always ready for the change. These are very minor complaints and they are not meant to imply that this is not a book worth reading.  I do recommend that you pick up a copy of this one!

The main characters are Summer and Daniel, whose families dislike one another. Summer and Daniel are both crushing on each other, although neither has been brave enough to act on it.  Both characters are insecure but fairly normal teens. They don't have special powers or family secrets or the ability to see ghosts.  (A refreshing change from the glut of other paranormal YA books.)

Summer and Daniel do have somewhat dysfunctional parents. Their Mothers are stereotypical from a YA standpoint.   One is a helicopter parent and the other is detached and uninvolved, even though she believes that she "lives" for her child.  Most teens will relate to some of these traits and sympathize with Summer and Daniels' feelings toward their Mothers.  

Summer and Daniel have very little time to discover their affection for each other before Daniel is turned into a zombie.  I would have liked to see a little more time for their relationship to develop.  It happens very quickly and it makes Summer's devotion to Daniel less believable. Summer's obsession with helping Daniel  seems to have no basis. It made her appear kind of silly and immature.  If Summer and Daniel had had at least one chapter for their relationship to develop, I think most readers would have found the relationship more realistic and thus, inspire more sympathetic feelings towards Summer.  Because of this, I had a harder time liking Summer at first.  However, as the story plays out, Summer becomes stronger and smarter.  She begins to evolve into a character that I care about.

I really found Daniel to be an interesting character.  He has a funny self-depreciating wit.  I was really not quite ready for him to become a zombie and I missed his humor throughout the rest of the book.

The ending of the book has an interesting twist and since this appears to the first of a series of books, I am looking forward to see where the author, Eric Soblik takes us in the next book. If you are a fan of zombie stories you don't want to miss this one.  If you are not a zombie fan, this book is still entertaining and worth your time.  Pick up a copy!

Thanks to Eric Soblik for proving a copy of his self published this book for this review.

Pure (Pure #1) by Julianna Baggott

Published February 8th 2012 by Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 145550306


Quoted from GoodReads:

"We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . . 


Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run. 


Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . . 


There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that protects their healthy, superior bodies. Yet Partridge, whose father is one of the most influential men in the Dome, feels isolated and lonely. Different. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his family is broken; his father is emotionally distant; his brother killed himself; and his mother never made it inside their shelter. Or maybe it's his claustrophobia: his feeling that this Dome has become a swaddling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase suggests his mother might still be alive, Partridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her. 


When Pressia meets Partridge, their worlds shatter all over again."

I am developing a love-hate relationship with books that are part of a series.  I love that the story continues and that I get to visit some of my favorite characters again, but I hate waiting for the other books to come out.  I want instant gratification!  I do not want to wait to see what happens!

OK, now that I got that out of my system, I can proceed to the book review....

There seems to be a lot of debates out there about the genre that this book falls into.  Is it YA or adult dystopian or is it a "crossover"??  When I was growing up we only had two genres, fiction and non-fiction.  I don't really think it matters what genre you place this book in.  I read what I like.  And I liked Pure.

Now, not everyone is going to agree with me about this book (no matter what their age is).  Which is part of why I liked it.  This a dark, dark world.  It's not a happy place to be. There is very little romance and the heroine is not beautiful, kind and brilliant.  This is a world that the conspiracy theorists will love!  This book is refreshingly different from anything I have read recently.

The story is told from multiple characters view points.  The writing was so well done, that I hardly noticed this until after I was finished with the book.  Usually I have to stop and re-read pages of books that are written in this manner and I find it confusing and distracting.  The author, Julianna Baggott makes the transition between characters seamless.  Overall, it is a beautifully written novel. ( I didn't have the urge to grab my red pen and correct grammar and sentence structure once!)

This is a world where the people of influence, power and wealth have isolated them selves from the rest of the population.  Instead of a gated community and exclusive country club, they built a self contained Dome and plotted to destroy the rest of the population.  They are the "Pures".  Hitler and his Aryan race come to mind about now. This political undertone continues to be just barely submerged beneath the surface of the plot.

The bombs are detonated. The people outside the dome suffer but continue to survive in their damaged world. Instead of the genetic experiments and concentration camps of the Holocaust, the detonations were engineered to destroy and create genetic mutations.  People fused with whatever objects they happened to be near at the time.  The results are so bizarre and deeply disturbing that it adds a surreal feeling to the book, an almost "nightmarish" feeling of horror that persists throughout  the book.  This is where the book begins.

These mutated characters are fascinating, yet repulsive.   Pressia is the "heroine" of this tale, but as I mentioned above, is not your typical heroine.  She has mutations like all of the others, but I found hers to be particularly freakish. Despite this, Pressia is resilient and resourceful.  She evolves as the book progresses and becomes stronger even though she is discovering some horrific facts about her life pre-detonation.

 Not a lot of action takes place in beginning chapters.  But the author uses this part of the book to vividly describes the world and it's inhabitants. The pace of the book picks up in the second half of the story.  The first half didn't drag, but there was a tremendous amount of world building and detailed description needed to set the tone of this world.  It is worth the wait.


When I read the first book of a series, I try to treat it as a prologue to the rest of the series.  There will be unanswered questions and parts of the plot that are not resolved.  I have to remind myself  of this as I get near the end of the book and everything is not neatly resolved.  (back to the love-hate thing...)  But, I am ready for more!  I need to know what happens!

As dark as this story is, I  didn't find it depressing.  At the end you are left with a little glimmer of hope for the main characters and their world.

P.S. The book cover art is beautiful and intriguing!


Thanks to Netgalley and the author for allowing me the opportunity to read and provide an honest review this book.

Cinder (Lunar Chronicles #1) by Marissa Meyer

Expected publication: January 3rd 2012 by Feiwel & Friends

My Rating Scores:
Cover Art Rating: ***** 5 out of 5 stars
Overall Content: ****.5  4.5 out of 5 stars


Quoted from GoodReads: Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . . 


Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future. 


In this thrilling debut young adult novel, the first of a quartet, Marissa Meyer introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine and a masterfully crafted new world that’s enthralling.

I was so excited to get this ARC in the mail! I loved the book cover, it grabbed my attention right away.  I would have picked this one up in the book store based on the cover alone.   It was perfect reading during the busy holiday season.  Lite and fast read that was thoroughly entertaining. (One of the many reasons I love the YA genre.)

Cinder is based on the Cinderella fairy tale, but with a unique spin.  It's set in a futuristic si-fi type environment in "New Beijing" of all places!(There is not much of an Asian feel to the book and I do wonder about the author's choice of  this setting.)  The strangest part of all is that Cinder is cast as a cyborg. She has some really cool abilities as a result of being a cyborg.  Even one of her feet is mechanical.  That gives the glass slipper part of the fairy tale a whole new set of problems/possibilities.

Cinder has a wonderful "R2D2 type" of android sidekick with loads of personality. It seemed that personality in an android is considered an undesirable trait by this society and the personality of Cinder's android was considered a programming glitch making the android an outcast worthy of Cinder's company.

The defective android is Cinder's only friend until she meets Prince Kai.  That's when the story takes off.  Some of  the plot is predictable, but isn't that what why we love fairy tales in the first place?  This story does have some characters that are cast a bit differently from the original Cinderella tale, so don't expect a  si-fi regurgitation the original story.  The Cinderella tale is just a starting point for the plot.

My only criticism of this book is that New Beijing has many rules, laws and concepts that are presented as fact, but not fully explained to the reader.  The idea that cyborgs are considered  to have less rights than humans seemed to be a law that had a big impact on the plot of the story.  This was just presented as a fact. There is potential for some really  thought provoking situations within this story.  I say potential, because none of them were fully examined in this book. The author, Marissa Meyer, does lay the ground work to do so in the future books. I look forward to seeing if the other books in the series will take advantage of this. Did this affect my enjoyment of the book? No.  I really did have fun reading this story!

Now I have to admit that I peeked at some of the reviews already out there (and there are A LOT of them) before I wrote this review. It seemed to me that some of the reviewers forgot that this is a YA book. Not that YA is a genre to be discounted or considered less valid than any other genre of books. Just meaning that you need to remember the intended audience here.   It seemed like some reviewers were expecting more from this book.  Even though many adults are reading YA, it is still meant for young adults.

 My 15 year old daughter saw this book come in the mail and was begging to read it.  I handed it off to her as soon as I finished reading it.  She loved it and finished it in one day.  It is important to note that my daughter reads, but she has never read a book in one day.  I anticipate that my copy will be passed among all of her friends and coveted by others that are not lucky enough to be her list.  She and her friends ARE the intended audience. I predict that this book (and the others in the series) are going to be considered  a  "Must Read " among this group, and many of us more mature readers as well!

****1/2  ( 4 1/2 out of 5 stars)

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing me with an  ARC and the opportunity to read and review this book.