Review: A great story
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 9, 2014
I want to start by saying that regardless of some of the issues I had with the writing and grammar in this book, the story itself was amazing. I would call it more New Adult, as opposed to Young Adult, but it was engaging no matter what your age.Editing is a big issue for me – and apparently many others – so I rate each book on a 1 - 10 scale (1 being the least amount of errors, 10 being, "wtf are they talking about?"). I give this one a 5. There are quite a bit of errors in the beginning, but they do thin out a bit as you go along. There were only a few times I really had to reread a sentence to try to figure out what was being said. But no doubt, it needed editing.The other issue I have that I find even more annoying than the lack of editing is when the author constantly uses excessively proper speech in their characters conversations. People don’t speak that way in everyday conversation and there is nothing wrong with using contractions. Sometimes it is more effective to use each word individually, but in most cases, it’s not necessary. I kept hoping that particular issue would get better as the story went on, but it did not. Even so, this story was interesting enough that I tried to ignore it and just correct those words in my head as I read along.My last complaint is about the paragraphs and their length. First of all, use them. On average a paragraph can range from one sentence to seven. Though opinions may vary on that, I think that holds mostly true for novel authors. Still, it doesn’t consist of page after page of non-stop sentences. Break them up for crying out loud. It makes it very difficult to follow where you are. And if you look away for a second, forget it. You’ll have to reread half the page to find where you left off. That is one thing I noticed new authors do a lot, but it’s not a deal breaker. And it didn’t stop me from finishing this story.As for the story itself, I really loved it. I thought Abby’s character was a pretty accurate depiction of how a 16 year old girl might handle herself in the zombie apocalypse. She didn’t go from high school student to zombie slayer over night. In the beginning, she just ran. And really, who wouldn’t. She didn’t do crazy stunts, trying to stop and save everyone she saw in trouble, knowing she just couldn’t. Her sole focus was her little sister and getting her and her sister home to her mother and Connor, her high school sweetheart.Along the way, she meets up with another group of survivors that consist mostly of a family. I thought that each of those characters was well written and I loved all of them. Especially Jeremiah. He too was written in a realistic manner that made him very endearing. They had a lot of obstacles along the way. Of course, that’s expected. It is the zombie apocalypse. This story did become a bit predictable though. It got to the point that you could tell right before something would happen because the author would basically say, “ok, it’s all clear,” then, “oh wait, now we’re in another predicament.” In some way’s it was too clearly written that there would be a problem or an attack, they went through the motion, fixed the problem then moved on to the next. Sometimes it was just too cut and dry. But over all it progressed well.I think the only reason I’m being so critical of the writing itself is because I really did enjoy the story and would like to see the next one clear up a few of the problems that this one had. If I hadn’t liked the story so much I probably wouldn’t give a crap about these issues.So the bottom line is that it’s worth the read and I intend to get the next book when it comes out. And for those of you who have issues with cliffhangers, this has one. I may have waited for the next book to release before starting this one if I had known that. But I'm still glad I read it.