Samantha is holed up
all alone in her apartment, trying to outlast the zombie apocalypse.
During a routine trip into town for supplies, she is chased through the
city by vicious Warriors, men that kill zombies, and make women wish
they were dead. After being trapped on a roof at gunpoint, she is saved
by the brothers Ryder and Reese, and she decides they might be her best
chance for survival.
They set out from her apartment in search of
a place that they can fortify and have a semi-normal life. Along the
way, Samantha helps battle zombies, other survivors, and her growing
feelings for both brothers. When they finally reach the island, the
group settles in, trying to make the place as livable as possible.
However, trouble quickly arises in the form of the Warriors.
They've
tracked the group of four down to their new home, and are out for
revenge.
My Review:
Sam
is a 19 year old who has so far survived the zombie apocalypse and a
gang of vicious zombie hunters who like to rape women and kill other
survivors. We are led to believe that she is smart yet knowing this gang
are looking for her, she walks into the most used trap in history-a
seemingly injured man lying out in plain sight and yes, she goes to see
if she can help and ends up captured until two brothers come to her
rescue. Stupid girl! Has she never read a zombie apocalypse book?
Seriously
the plot is not the issue with this book. It is well enough written and
described, there isn't really anything wrong with it but I don't
greatly like the characters. Sam is ok but despite being unable to shoot
a gun, she decides to endanger the three of them by tring an armed
rescue of another female instead of planning before acting. Then she
gets all jealous when the rescued girl turns out to be prettier than
her. I really hate this kind of female MC. Ryder is obnoxious and rude
and I question the decisions the author makes about him. He is willing
to take on a group of armed men to save Sam yet refuses to initially
save October who is in the same situation. He spends the rest of his
time being an asshat. reese is just too good to be true and all nicey
all the time. Add in the lack of zombies in the beginning and the fact
that reviews mention a love triangle and I rapidly lost interest in this
one.
Not badly written but just not to my taste.
When the first outbreaks
occurred, the reports were quickly stifled. By the time the dead began
to walk in Lansing, Michigan, it was already too late to stop the
plague.
In the heart of the city, a child with cancer and her
caretaker risk their lives to help a security guard and a nurse secure
an old hospital. As the survivors struggle to stay alive, the grid begins to fail.
All the while, the dead fight to get inside.
My Review:
All
week I have been catching up with zombie books that have been sitting
on my ereader. This is the fifth one I've read and it was another poor
one. It hasn't been a great week overall.
Lets start with our
hero MC, Eric the hospital security guard. Eric lives at home with mummy
and slobs around the basement, not ever bothering to tidy up, wash
himself or wash his uniform, meaning he literally stinks. He is the
laziest man on the planet and spends most of his shift sleeping out of
sight or stuffing his face from vending machines. He is rude,
disgusting, sex obsessed, useless and a complete moron. And THIS is
supposed to be the hero of the book? He slimes about chatting up nurses
and pigging out, and the appearance of him on each page makes you want
to shower to wash Eric slime out of your brain. He's one of the most
revolting charachers I've had the misfortune to read about. All he does
is wet himself and vomit over people throughout the book. Gross.
Eric
is also a compulsive liar, trying to make himself look good and heroic
and sexy (*shudder*) when in fact he is a useless coward who never does
his job. He is obsessing over the ex he has been stalking since she
dumped him and capturing a female zombie to be his new girlfriend.
(*double shudder*) Why has he not been bitten already? We also have the
nurse who is so bad at her job that she keeps it only by sleeping with
her boss. Surprise. Add in the opening chapter about the sex obsessed
borderline paedophile on a cruise who is there just to annoy women and
get laid (some hope of that mate) and just finds zombies on the ship.
Not sure what the point was in his somewhat short story at the start of
the book.
There were a few decent characters in the hospital like
Eric's security boss Jack, the nurse Keith, and the biker gang but that
bit of the story which was decent kept being ruined by Eric's stupid
ass adventures outside the hospital and I got fed up every time we
switched back to him. By the time he was back to annoying his ex and her
kids, and getting in everyone's way, I'd had all of him that I could
stomach.
There was potential in this book if we had stuck to the
main story in the hospital and followed those interesting characters and
left Eric out completely. Sadly Eric ruins the entire book and I doubt
I'll bother trying anything else by the author in case Eric or something
similar pops up again.
Zach Gunderson, a
skinny sixteen-year-old High School sophomore, is caught up in a
worldwide infection which turns its victims into violent zombies.
Together with his friends, Zach learns to survive in a world turned
upside down. In addition to the violent zombies, there are the lawless
survivors which his group must contend against as well.
My Review:
This is one of these books where you think 'just hurry up and get to the
damn zombies!' The book bored me with 8 chapters of Zach loves Macey,
Zach has sex with Macey, Zach can't get in touch with Macey, Zach's
grandmother dies, Zach is cheated on and dumped by Macey, Zach is beaten
up by Macey's new boyfriend's pals and ends up in hospital, Zach ends
up having his humiliation put up on social networking sites, Zach has
his house covered in grafitti slagging him off, Zach wants Macey
back...oh and in amongst all this tosh, we hear about a flu virus and
alcoholic prepper Rick takes Zach in and says the end of the world is
coming.
This was so boring. Can I just say that frankly I don't
give a damn about Zach and Macey? Couldn't care less yet we got every
minute of their relationship. Zach seems to think Macey is so wonderful
when in fact she is a cold hearted slut who is sleeping with at least
two guys at the same time and doesn't lift a finger to stop Zach being
beaten up. *Yawn* And for the next two chapters he continues to obsess
about the bitch and gets threatened by black racist friend of Macey's
new man who refers to her as white bitch and constantly sneers at the
white boy he plans to attack. Zach finally fights back and now has the
police to worry about as he hides at Rick's farm and I'm thinking GET TO
THE DAMN ZOMBIES ALREADY!
Rick is always drunk and talking about
having sex with women. When the apocalypse finally creeps into their
town, this is all Rick can think about and they decide to venture into
town to find booze and scout for women, finding a family with two women
that they find attractive. All we get then are the sexual fantasies of
Zach and Rick and I got tired of it. All through the book, every woman
Zach meets is described by breast size first ie the nurse, the TV
presenter, the women staying with them. Oh please! Thought this was a
zombie novel?
Oh and the first zombie they see up at the farm
happens to be a naked woman and Rick recognises the neighbour's wife
that he had been sleeping with. Of course. I shouldn't have expected any
better than that. Tired of the lack of zombies, I got tired of reading
this poor excuse for a zombie book with racist and sexist characters.
Zombies plague the
apocalyptic landscape, insatiable and wreaking havoc on the remaining
uninfected. Settlements desperately hold out, fighting for the last
remnants of civilization while striving for a return to normalcy.
At
twenty years old, I should be worrying about final exams and where I’m
going for spring break. Instead, I’m sharpening blades and loading guns. My
family chooses to make its home away from the settlements, deep in the
Rocky Mountains of Colorado. We raid stores across the state, gathering
supplies which we in turn trade to the settlements. It’s a simple, but dangerous, existence and biters haunt us every step of the way.
Lucky for us, I have a secret . . . I’m a necromancer. My name is Anya Donovan and this is my survival story.
My Review:
I
was disappointed that we joined the story in the middle of the zombie
apocalypse because I like to read about the outbreaks and how society
breaks down. I find that if we join the apocalypse late we then get info
dumps looking back at how they got organised etc which can slow the
books down too much for me. But that is a personal preference and I
didn't mark the book down for that.
Put simply, I marked this
down and didn't finish it because I hated the characters. You know you
are in trouble reading a zombie novel when you want several of the
'heroes' to get ripped apart. In this book I would start with Anya's
brother Alexi who is a moronic, rude, obnoxious, reckless, childish
dumbass who seems to be more of a toddler than anything else. Seriously
he's like a loudmouthed child with no concept of how to behave and when
to shut his idiotic mouth. One page after he was introduced I wanted him
dead. Then we have the rescued prisoner Zeke who is a foul mouthed,
racist, bigoted little shit to put it bluntly. Add to that the spoiled
little madam of a sister that Anya has who has tantrums every ten
seconds. Feed these idiots to the zombies NOW.
I don't like
plots where getting around the zombies is too easy. During the
apocalypse, Anya discovers she is some kind of necromancer who with a
single thought can put a group of zombies to sleep, allowing them to
waltz into any shop they want to raid with ease. I love it in zombie
books when the heroes have to do a dangerous supply raid and take on
zombies in a dark store or shop! It takes all the tension out when Anya
can just put them to sleep for a bit so that was a real disappointment.
The
authors also seem to be obsessed with condoms and sex in the plot which
was very boring. We constantly get talk about Viktor and his girlfriend
having sex and him collecting condoms on raids. We get Anya wondering
if Alexi is gathering condoms to be ready if he gets a chance-yeah like
any girl would be desperate enough to want HIM even during an
apocalypse. And Anya is then thinking about getting condoms to use with
her boyfriend, then they want to trade condoms for medical help and on
it goes. There are more condoms than zombies in this book. The
characters are meant to be capable adults but all act like spoiled kids,
bickering and arguing and talking rubbish when they should be
concentrating on raids and zombies that could actually kill you. I
pretty much hated them all.
I didn't find much of interest in
this book and I won't be picking up anything else by the authors. I
prefer zombie books that focus on the zombies not the sexual exploits of
a foul mouthed cast of idiots that I hope all die!
It's not every day that you get to travel abroad and take a holiday. It should be a time to celebrate and then a time to relax. Unfortunately for everyone flying out of Britain's busiest airports on the 1st of July, they chose the wrong day. Airport lounges up an down the country are infected with the deadly "Day Zed" virus. The unsuspecting holidaymakers are to become the reason why the virus is transmitted all over the world in just one day.
Follow Penny Thomas and ten other survivors as they battle to stay alive during the outbreak of Day Zed.
My Review:
The idea was interesting-three labs work on the different strains of a
virus, thinking they are doing work for a medical breakthrough-then one
man joins it all together to turn it into a zombie virus for his
demented employer to release around English airports to stop the world
population consuming all resources while the chosen few sit safe on an
island to watch the carnage.
However I thought the execution was
poor in comparison to other zombie books that I read. Firstly, the lack
of editing is really bad. Bad spelling, capital letters in the middle of
sentences, grammatical errors everywhere, things that don't make sense,
being allergic to full stops and instead using endless paragraphs with
an overdose of commas. If the writer can't be bothered to check the
quality of his work before release, then why should the reader bother to
put in the effort to read it? Now I can forgive sloppy editing if the
story is good but sadly I didn't enjoy it.
Every man in this part
of the book is an asshat. It's an asshat parade! Wideboy Simon does
anything for money and thinks he is releasing a flu virus at the airport
to make people ill so had little sympathy for him turning zombie.
Pervert Jim sits in his house with a telescope to spy on Simon's
girlfriend Penny and is amused to see a woman lose her clothes as she
battles a zombie. Dave the taxi driver rescues the hysterical Penny and
only decides to look after her in her trauma because he fancies her.
Frankly, I'm rooting for the zombies in this book if these are the
heroes.
Then we have the all tell no show plot. We are told about
the plot and what Simon and the couriers are to do to release the
virus. Then we are told they have done it and infection has begun. So we
just follow Simon home and are told he died. There is no build up of
tension to the release of the virus. It would have been more exciting to
follow Simon on his mission and see what was happening to him mentally
as he realises things are not what they seem. We get long narratives
telling us what is happening and only a small bit about the neighbours
of Penny fighting the zombies. It just wasn't enough detail. We could
have switched POV to several neighbours debating whether or not to help
the paramedic to get an idea of what they were thinking, instead of a
couple of paragraphs where a few people run out to help and get bitten
before we get to give a damn about them. That little section could have
been good but a lack of development from the author meant it was just a
group of strangers shoved out their doors to die and the reader has no
connection to them so doesn't really care. Seeing everything through
Jim's eyes as he thought about Penny was hardly interesting.
This
story lacks depth and development and basic storytelling description
that pulls you into a book. Instead if integrating zombie action or things of interest to the plot, we just skim over it and go to the male characters having fantasies about the women which is such a bore and not what I want in my zombie novel. The characters all seem to be idiots with no
attempt to make them more than one dimensional. It didn't hold my
attention in any way and I moved on to try something else instead. Maybe
it gets better later on but if the opening of a book does not grab me
and drag me into the story, I won't care enough to continue. I can't
really recommend it.
