Review: 3.5 actually
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 21, 2011
This book is pretty well written, and needs only minor editing, which is great given the state of a lot self-pubbed stuff.  It's in blog format which, similar to the journal thing, has been done to death.  The author is, however, able to tell the story surprisingly well given that there are barely any other "voices" in this story.  Not directly, anyway.  But it takes away from the story that he publishes the blog in his own real name.He never explains why the zombies show up, fine.  He and his wife just immediately basically turn their house into a fortress, max out all their credit cards buying any and every thing one might need to ride out the zombpocalypse.  Fine.  Then they immediately start fortifying the whole neighborhood, fine.  It's awfully convenient that ALL OF THE NEIGHBORS either get killed or leave, and Josh `n friends get to take over the whole neighborhood to form "The Compound".Quite a number of Josh's talented and intelligent and cool and nerdy/geeky, but all around great, fantastic friends survive this nightmare in groups, intact.  And OF COURSE, they all get rescued by Josh, who just keeps on finding all of his friends and family alive and well, even though BILLIONS of other people have perished.And like I mentioned before, Josh and his wife maxed out their credit cards and are sitting very pretty to make it through the long haul, but within SIX DAYS of the end of the world, they are hunting and eating SQUIRREL.  I mean, I know it's Kentucky, but come ON.  Six days??  And there's the whole thing like another reviewer mentioned about his wife smiling benevolently nearby, silently encouraging Josh to "do" his high school crush because they have to repopulate the world.This group is unbelievably lucky and of course manage to find every single little thing they need to withstand.  They have planted farms within days, started constructing a wall, making contact with other survivor groups*, rescuing people, etc., etc., etc.And while all this is going on, nearly the entire rest of the population that managed to survive is hell bent on wiping out Josh and his group.  Except for his friends and the others they rescued EVERY ONE ELSE IN THE STATE AND SURROUNDING AREA seem to be looters/marauders/rapists/ babykillers/thieves/criminals/cannibals and are out to take what Josh and his group have.He has the new and interesting idea of some of the zombies developing "smarts" (they call them the `smarties'), actually beginning to show limited intelligence, planning, and some sort of communication that enables them to work together to hunt human prey, and actually be cunning and smart, not just mindless flesh munchers.  This is a nice new element.Despite what it sounds like above, this is not a bad story, not at all.  It's a bit self-serving and preachy because many of Josh's blog posts are about forming new governments/leadership, and accepting new moralities and how the government shouldn't control too much of our lives and they were going to do it new and better, blah blah blah.  And then they proceed to set up a few rules which, even though rules are needed to make a society run smoothly and civilly, they start to muck it up.LOTS of monologue and discourse about morality, government, and Josh's views of the world, which gets preachy and annoying.My only real major problem (besides the whole squirrel/repopulate the world thing) is that the book just...ends.  No wrap up, conclusion, finality...nothing.  He gets to the end of that day's blog post, and that's it.  I know there's a sequel, but I really feel like every book should stand alone, even when more are planned.*Google ROCKS.