I generally prefer blogging in the morning, but I literally just finished reading this week’s book about 15 minutes ago.
So, Alice in Zombieland:
From Amazon:
“She won’t rest until she’s sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever.
Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that’s all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone.
Her father was right. The monsters are real.
To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn’t careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies.”
I was super stoked when I first heard about this book. I’ve read Gena Showalter’s other YA series (Intertwined, etc), and died at the end of book 3 (I sincerely hope she writes book 4 sometime soon because OH. MY. GLOB. I CANNOT WAIT), and one of her romance novels which I cannot recall the name of at the moment. Either way, I greatly admired her storytelling skills.
And yet…
I wasn’t sure what to expect with Alice. I was kinda hoping it would be a modernized re-telling, and I had my fingers crossed for a zombie Mad Hatter (because that biz would have been REDONK. And by ‘redonk’, I mean glorious). But apart from some symbolism (i.e. the white rabbit, the modified chapter titles, which I loved), it’s not a re-telling in any way.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I felt about it. It started off incredibly strong, keeping me hooked for the first 3-4 chapters.
And then, truth be told, it started on a downward slope once Alice met Cole. Because from that point on, it read like a typical YA book (and you must understand, I live for young adult fiction, so that’s not meant as a derogatory term).
Parts of it reminded me of Alyson Noel’s The Immortals series (especially the thing that I’m not going to spoil re: Alice’s younger sister). And parts of it were, unfortunately, predictable (for me at least).
Also, I had a hard time liking Alice herself – at times, her dialogue sounded forced, the way people imagine teenagers talk, when in reality, not all teenagers tYp3 lYk3 di5). And Cole was very dominating, which maybe appeals to some girls, but personally, if I had a boyfriend who constantly tried to tell me what to do, I’d have a perpetual Josh Franceschi face:
This picture never gets old.
Plus Alice doesn’t actually come face-to-face with a zombie until somewhere around page 150. I too have a problem with dragging through the first 3 chapters before actual events happen, but, unlike Gena Showalter, I haven’t published 25+ novels in the past decade.
Overall, I don’t know what to feel. I wanted so desperately to love it, and I feel like it failed me (or maybe I failed it?). Still, my interest was captured long enough to read it (400 pages in total), so – who are we kidding? – I’ll probably read the sequel.
Even though in the Q&A at the back, Gena Showalter hinted at another “hot zombie slayer”. I don’t know why authors find it necessary to introduce love triangles in the second (or third) book in a series.
Here’s hoping Through the Zombie Glass is better.
“…sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll
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