Review: Wish it were longer
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 1, 2013
Disclaimer: I got this book free in exchange for doing a review.I liked this book, although I wish it had been longer. It had an interesting premise--set in the future, the war against the zombies has been going on for a few years. Mankind has learned a lot about organizing and fighting back but by now, they are badly outnumbered.Long distance communication (and we're grading on a curve for what counts as long distance in comparison to today) has pretty much fallen by the wayside. When an important message needs to be passed on, it is given to a Scout to deliver.Scouts are a special division of the army. They travel alone and on foot through the zombie-infested city to deliver the message. In this book, the distance was about 5 miles.As I understand it, each chapter will be about a different Scout trying to complete his mission to deliver the assigned communication. This chapter was interesting with good characterization and lots of zombie action.The main drawback I had with it is that it's just too short. This is a personal thing on my part but I don't generally care for reading a story in short bursts like this. I think the set up of each chapter featuring a different Scout on a mission would be less annoying that a more continuous serial that focuses on one character or group of characters but I still much prefer to read these things all together as one book.I saw that he does have the first three chapters collected together in one book, although it's still fairly short. I believe it's just over 200 pages. I liked this story and the world he's created. I'd be interested in reading more but the length is pretty short still, especially when you consider I've already read 70-some pages of it.The only other real drawback to the story is technical. There were numerous times that the author seemed to leave out a word, especially in the first half. It seemed to get better on that front as it went on. Even so, it did still happen and it would kind of take me out of the story when it did and I'd have to pause to figure out what the missing word was.There was one technical error that really took me aback for a moment. He's with several other soldiers in the midst of a big zombie battle. One lunges at him and the author writes something along the lines of "He threw the zombie over his soldier". I realized fairly quickly that he meant to write "shoulder" but for a moment there, I was rather confused.If you don't mind short works or serials, I'd recommend this book. I thought, technical problems aside, that it was pretty well written and that his take on the zombie apolcalypse was an interesting one.