Review: the humor, the gore and sexual references are great
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 31, 2014
Pete wakes to find a lot of blood.  He wakes to find a dead girl.  What’s worse is that he wakes to find that he is dead too.  Pete is an Animate, a dude brought back from the dead to be enslaved by a “User”.  The problem is, Pete doesn’t know who his User is; he doesn’t know why he was brought back as an Animate—and he doesn’t want to know.  Pete wants out, but going on the run might just be worse than sticking around.Raised, by Sharon Stevenson, is the first book in a series, and if this opening novel is anything to go by it’ll be a hugely enjoyable collection of books.  Stevenson has a unique and engaging style of writing; she knows how to make her characters breathe (even the zombified Animate dead ones), and she knows how to sustain a good plot.  It’s a first person POV story, which usually isn’t my favorite for such a long piece of fiction, but Stevenson does a great job with this.  The wording, the humor, the gore and sexual references are great, and really carry this book forward.Traveling from Scotland to Las Vegas, encountering an enjoyable cast of “normal” people and alien vampires, in addition to our Animate zombie, Raised is a book that will have you enjoying the ride and hoping it’ll never end. Thankfully, with other books in this series on the horizon, it won’t end for a while.