Chuckles Mini Reviews Catchup

I review everything I read, on my blog and on Goodreads. Most reviews are of a decent length but sometimes you don't have much to say about the book because of its length or you DNFed it or various other reasons. In cases like that it makes sense to write a few mini reviews in one post and clear them out your way! So lets catch up with reviews from April and May.

1) Boyd Craven-Flirting With Death
Jim thought he had everything a man could ever want. A job, an apartment and a girlfriend, Janie, who he was working on getting back. But then, tragedy struck. After her funeral, Jim travels to northern Michigan to decompress and deal with his feelings in a rustic log cabin owned by his deceased girlfriend's family. Not only is the cabin off the grid, it is a place of peace and solitude; that is, until the Ebola virus is unleashed upon the USA. In a panic, the CDC and the FDA release a vaccine that's only just started testing...

Now the infected roam the world, and even in northern Michigan, Jim isn't safe. He eagerly awaits Janie's family to join him; preppers who may be the key to his survival - and the only family he has left. In a world of the infected, can he carve out a slice of safety and sanity?

After the death of his estranged pregnant girfriend, spending time alone at her family cabin is just what Jim needs. While he is there, he is disturbed by panic buying in the town and rumours of an Ebola based virus outbreak in Los Angeles. Reports from Janie's family indicate that the cure for the virus has caused a zombie apocalypse and they are trying to get to the cabin and safety. Jim has rescued Claire and her son Justin and all they can do is wait at the cabin and avoid the zombies.

This was a bit bog standard and the focus was more on the relationships between the characters than the zombies or the Ebola virus. There was a lot about Jim's doomed relationship with his dead girlfriend and him feeling sorry for himself for her dying when he wanted her back. Well it was his own fault for accusing her of having an affair with a lecturer and not trusting her when she denied it. The irony about Jim is that shortly after reaching the cabin he develops two possible interests in Claire, the woman that he rescues, and Janie's sister Sarah. So much for him mourning his lost love when he's hooking up so soon after her death! Quite why all the woman loved Jim is kind of beyond me as he wasn't very smart and was clueless about survival compared to the women. We had Claire and Sarah competing for his attention, which dominated this novella and overshadowed the zombies, which felt more like a random background threat through most of the book.  

The love angst I felt was too much and there lacked chemistry or any real point to it as far as I saw. It felt forced and was pretty dull. I wanted to see more about the Ebola outbreak and the virus cure turning people into zombies. I wanted more zombies and less relationship angst. It overall feels like a bit of a missed opportunity with good ideas being left a bit vague and underdeveloped.

Read May 2019
2.5 stars. 

2) John W Vance-The Defiant
For years a few have warned that a day of reckoning was coming, but those warnings went unheeded and even mocked. Then that day came…When Nicholas McNeil, a father and dedicated husband, turned out the lights in his suburban home Sunday night, they would never turn on again. During the early Monday morning hours, a spectacular and well coordinated attack destroys the grid and brings the United States to its knees. 

Nicholas was a man who had heeded the warnings to a degree, but most did not. With a society unprepared and a government overwhelmed, panic turns to chaos and soon violence. Fighting for what resources are still available, Nicholas and his family also find themselves fighting to survive as society turns on itself. 

This was an easy DNF decision as I don't think I liked a single character in the book. The women in particular were dreadful. Nicholas, our hero is a prepper who has no idea of what an EMP is or how to recognise it happening. his wife Becky spends all her time moaning at and mocking her husband for his prepping. When he tries to alert her that something is wrong, she is determined not to listen so she can lie on in her bed in peace. When she finally grasps reality, she starts to whinge and whine about everything. She and Nicholas even consider having sex in the middle of a scene where Nicholas is going to check if her parents are ok. Seriously??? Their daughter Abigail is a sulky, stroppy teenage bitch and kicks off at everything despite the country being in the middle of a terrorist attack. Becky gets her attitute from her opinionated self obsessed father and weak willed mother and Frank really did test the last of my patience with this family.

The other characters were just as bad. Bryn is a grumpy bitch who likes to shout and snap at her neighbour Matt every time he tries to help with something. Her sister Sophie is a stupid snowflake who thinks anarchy is cool and that life is going to be so exciting when society fails. She then gets scared out of her tiny mind when a riot breaks out in a grocery store. Bit of a pathetic anarchist really. The neighbour Matt seems to be forever sneaking up to the girls and managing to scare them so he is also an idiot. What is it with all these stupid characters? The only interesting one is Michael and he has amnesia! I honestly didn't care about the plot after meeting the cast of total losers and it was an easy decision to DNF. It is one of the poorest apocalypse books I've tried as I wasn't rooting for even one character.

Read May 2019.
DNF 1 star.  

3) Nicholas Woode-Smith-Cape Zero
When social recluse and all round introvert, Peter Swart, manages to survive an attack by an insane homeless man, he soon discovers that Cape Town is not going to remain the holiday destination that it was previously regarded. In the wake of a failed government state of emergency, society crumbles in South Africa as a virus turns people into violent cannibals. Within a day, the already compromised military collapses. Cape Town becomes a dark zone and its residents are forgotten. With violent mobs roaming the streets, social anxiety and doubtable sanity thrown into the mix – will Peter be able to survive the apocalypse or, worse yet, the necessity to live with other people?  

I guess I should congratulate the author for deciding on a bit of diversity by having the MC as a social recluse who hates having to interact with real people. The problem is that Peter became so easy to hate because of the attitude he had towards other zombie victims. He is glad that a woman is killed and turned by a zombie because she dared to accidently bump into him when fleeing for her life. He doesn't care about all the problems in his country until it starts affecting his cozy life. The apartment he hd in was selected purely on the basis of his political leanings to the right. He talks to himself and ends up in proper arguments with himself over his own mental sanity which had me seriously wanting to strangle him. He gets annoyed when he tells his hunger pangs to leave and they don't, the apartment owner is a greedy pig to have dared to flee for safety taking his food with him as he should have left it all for Peter, he puts on gloves to protect his hands from contaminated blood and all he can fret about is whether he looks stylish. He is a character that I just couldn't find anything sympathetic in and I wanted him to get bitten.

For me, the writing was really bad. It was over descriptive waffle in the early paragraphs, to the point of driving me crazy. We don't need several paragraphs of Peter debating with himself over whether it was a mistake to hide there or not. The point is, it didn't bloody matter because he was leaving anyway! ie Peter had made a bad decision coming here, he remembered how he felt at the time of his decision, he brooded over whether it was the wrong decision, he worried it was not right to be there and concluded he was still alive so he must've done something right. JEEZ! WHO CARES??? It also takes an age to describe the weather on apocalypse day which had my mind wandering in the opening lines of the book. 

The descriptions of what was going on were weird. He has to eat cat food to survive and this is how he ate it...'after staring longingly at the cat food, he pounced. The feeble plastic packet was no match for his superior ripping abilities.' His thoughts on being hungry were 'damn my desire for sustenance!' Oh give me a break! The characters he met all talk like something out of the Middle Ages meets Monty Python which was offputting and annoying. There are plot gaps that were confusing. Characters went missing and it was never explained why, where they went and what they were doing. Thetre seemed to be no reason for the zombie attack on the compound and the way the defences cracked just seemed a bit too convenient-that and the fact that only Peter was smart enough to save himself.  It was strange and disjointed and even though I finished it, I can't say I enjoyed it.

I read this as I love Cape Town and it was nice to recognise where the apocalypse took place but I just felt a bit disappointed by all aspects of it.

Read May 2019.
1 star.