Review: Interesting but Unbelievable
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 11, 2012
I thought that the way that this book was written was interesting and somewhat unique. Unfortunately, there were a couple of things that stopped me from enjoying this book more. Some of these issues were large enough at times to bring me out of the story.The biggest issue is the main character. Every time a blog entry ends with "gotta go, attack coming" it's not just that. It's "Someone is calling me. There's an attack and zombies are getting in. PS, be sure you do blah, blah, blah. Will try to update when I can." Really? Is someone who is being called to come fight zombies going to take the minute or two to wrap up his post? No posts end with a partial sentence (such as "I want to tell you how we deal wi" and then cue end of post), with a later update of 'sorry, zombie attack, had to go earlier." Something like that would have been believable - if it's an emergency, you've got to go! You don't just sit around taking precious time to update a *blog*. It makes sense for someone to click 'submit' or even to leave the computer and post where it is and come back later to finish it.No explanation was given near the beginning of the story about how the blog was able to be updated. Yes, solar powers are there. But how is the website being hosted? Until Google comes into play - and then Google has the ability to reroute power to different communities, based on who all is using a cell phone? Everything attributed to Google seems very over the top and not plausible. The use of electronics seemed excessive.There were spelling issues, such as "god" instead of "got" and "it" instead of "if", etc. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to have a character who is misspelling in his blog, or if it's an oversight by the author.The zombies, surprisingly, get very little screen time. For a zombie apocalypse novel, I expected more description of them and more encounters with them! What did they look like? It was mentioned that some are fast, while others are slow, but overall more concern seemed to be in dealing with looters/marauders. Until the so-called "smarties" came along. But even then, very little mention of zombies, and of zombie fight scenes. Maybe it's a limitation of the blog style of the novel, but I wish there were more action scenes. I don't expect full-out gore, but I want to know why these zombies are so bad and so feared. I want to know exactly how devastating they are. Aside from the scene where the zombies hitch a ride underneath the vehicle, and kill a half dozen people at the destination, they seem to do very little damage.The people in the compound, although they work to build a fence, gather weapons, etc, on the whole don't seem alarmed by the zombies. Neither does the narrator, Josh. Again, maybe it's due to the blog style of the book, but there's very little emotion displayed. No emotional break downs, no real struggles that aren't immediately overcome in a very cold and clinical manner.