Review: Enjoyable, fast reading experience
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 6, 2014
*SPOILER ALERT* If you have not yet read the first book in this series, you may wish to stop reading as this review may contain spoilers.The Highway, book two in J. Rudolph's Reanimates series, begins on the road, immediately following the end of book one, The Complex. Registered nurse, Cali, has just abandoned their not-so-safe apartment building and have taken to the road. If you've read my review of the first book, you'll know that I was not a believer in their plans to head into Vegas. So, I was skeptical going into this book. Cali is still making poor decisions which makes it difficult to buy her in a leadership role at times. Her impulsiveness and propensity for making frivolous stops to do some shopping puts the group in danger. This is especially odd, since as a nurse, critical thinking skills should have been beaten into her.Rudolph handled the road trip into Vegas well. And instead of staying put, she kept the characters on the road with the ultimate destination to be Trent's family in the Midwest. I like most of the cast, and we all know I'm a big fan of nurses, so it was fun to read the different clinical situations in which Nurse Cali's skills were put to use. Now let me qualify that. There are a few standout characters, but sometimes a person that intrigued me was killed off before I could become invested in them.I got a real laugh after having read a quote about the Nigerian Prince email scam. Minutes before I got to this part of the book the prince emailed my spam folder and I thought wow, I can't believe people are still doing this. I wonder if anyone's dumb enough to respond.People are going to pull their tricks any time they can, they always have. Hell, I'm still waiting on that pay out for helping that deposed king of Nigeria.The group gets waylaid on their trek, taken in by a strict group of survivors. Brother Michael, you can probably guess the kind of person he is just by his name, has a dark side. He may be fooling those who drank the Kool-Aid, but Cali's group sees right through the facade. Or do they?There were a few small editing issues, mostly in the arena of missing words like "by" and "the", but as a whole, they were minimal and the edit was leaps and bounds better than many self-pubbed titles I've read.Here's the not-so-good, I'm just going to put this out there, and I hate doing it, but I think this is something that every author should remain cognizant of when writing. Rudolph's writing style is clean and direct. Sometimes, though, this style has the ability to come off choppy with blunted sentences. This starts to become an issue not with the occasional occurrence, but when it's entire passages. Also, overall, there is a large amount of sentences that begin with pronouns for long strings of text. I, we, they... Again, this wouldn't stand out were they spread out a bit more.While noticeable, the sentence structure did not deter me from enjoying the story. And I look forward to reading the third -and final- book, just released last month, The Escape.One phrase in particular stood out and gave me pause, and I had to chuckle at it. "I almost shot a coat stand with a hat." Hmm. Why wouldn't you use a gun instead of the hat? (I'm still chuckling) I think this may have been more effectively worded to indicate the hat was on the coat stand, and not being used as a projectile. :)The story moves along at a good pace and there are peaks and valleys of conflict throughout. Now, this is purely a personal preference, but in both the first and second books, the focus is less on the undead and more on internal and external conflicts among living factions. Both book's main struggle/climax revolves around the group needing to escape their confines (both self-inflicted and forced) and a fight with opposing factions of the living. I'd love to see the focus shift more in the direction of struggling with the zombies. Again, this is my personal opinion, and I know many people that prefer the human battle over zombie.