Sick by Tom Leveen
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a fairly forgettable YA zombie novel from where i am standing in my old-lady shoes, but i think it is one its audience will appreciate. i can see young “reluctant reader” males getting something from it that i, supersaturated with zombie exposure, did not.
here are the book’s pros:
interesting zombies:
they are speedy in that “new millennial zombie” way, and they aren’t all reanimated corpses; they are ultra-strong and unusually-shaped, and… sparkly. like edward, i guess, but less mopey. these zombies don’t ever sigh or feel conflicted. they just feed.
drama geeks to the rescue!
it’s about time drama geeks got to rock in a zombie tale. prop swords and risers and set-building tools will come into play, although there is very little apart from that which gives the story that insider’s edge. which is a shame, because i think that would have made it stronger for me. you can understand the advantages a group of high-school jocks would have in fighting zombies: physical strength and agility and experience with strategically operating as a team, but what advantages would a group of drama geeks have? i think it would have been fun to see this explored more deeply.
good violent scenes:
if you’re a fan of zombie books, you know how important these are. the bloodshed is well-handled, and their splatteriness is another reason those video game-playing reluctant readers will eat this up with spoons. these zombies are strong enough to punch through car windows (or people’s faces), and there are many cool and bloody scenes, and also a willingness to kill off characters you might think are “safe.” although, again—a missed opportunity: the scene with the most potential for cool descriptive bloodbath-violence, the zombie pep rally, was conducted entirely offscreen. boooo
and its cons:
unlikeable protagonist:
usually this doesn’t bother me one way or another, and he’s not repellent or anything, just irritating in that very real-feeling, confident-teen way. his relationship with his sister is his only redeeming character trait. the rest—his general condescension and his attitude towards his girlfriend, are pretty grating.
insane love plot:
this revival-of-relationship (oh, like a zombie revives—i get it!) does not ring true, and feels like an item from a checklist. “must have love interest – check!”
too many coincidences:
see insane love plot. View Spoiler »
no resolution about how and why the zombies came to be:
sequel?? this feels too flimsy of a story to necessitate a sequel, but stranger things have happened.
abrupt ending:
View Spoiler »formatting:
and this will only affect people who are reading it through netgalley, but it needs to be said, because the jacked-up formatting may have contributed some sourness to my experience.
greg’s review goes into the formatting issues, and perhaps overthinks it, but i agree wholeheartedly:
It’s possible that part of the problem with the book was that there was a formatting glitch in the epub version I read. Every page (numbered page, not reading page) had at least one sentence in the wrong place. Like an experimental fiction non sequitur thrown in to break up the reading experience. Since the physicality of ebooks is already somewhat alienating to me, this just made getting at all immersed in the story almost impossible. It was like some third-rate Brechtian shit going on, always letting me know, you are reading a book, you are reading a book on a device, reading a book reading a book.
greg!!
but my biggest gripe is with the way it was marketed. this is not really the breakfast club meets the walking dead. the whole point of the breakfast club was that it depicted a selection of kids from different backgrounds and social standings (although all white and, presumably, straight) finding commonality when forced into close and extended contact. and, more powerfully, acknowledging the situational and entirely temporary nature of that commonality. this is completely different. this is not a random collection of students. it’s drama geeks plus our protagonist brian and his best friend, the blue-mohawked, marines-bound chad, who are in the stagecraft class because it is a blow-off class, and several of their friends. and, yes, their friends are both racially and socially diverse, and some of the drama geeks are sexual orientation-diverse, but it is a different dynamic altogether, because of the pre-existing friendships. and while the drama-geeks get screen time, and the opportunity to be heroic, they still aren’t given much character-development, so it misses the comparison completely. This is Not a Test is much closer, but a wholly different kind of book. this, if anything, is a benetton ad meets the walking dead.
but it is still a three-star cat book for me. it was fast-paced and had some interesting twists on the zombie-mythos, and i can totally see this being a fun read for its audience, my own gripes notwithstanding.
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