Review: Gripping and affecting
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 13, 2013
What makes THE LAST DAYS, BOOK 1 (The Last Day in the Life of Jillian), by Julie Cooper-Brown, different from every other Zombie Apocalypse story? Quite a bit, actually. This short novel - novella, really - combines a wry, desperate humor with truly gripping emotion and suspense. The pace of the plot escalates rapidly without ever feeling rushed. And though we know from the beginning this story is bound to end in grief, it's actually a tale of how very difficult it is to cause the abandonment of hope or to extinguish the human spirit.Despite the fact that this book needed much more careful editing - more on that in a moment - it is a suspenseful page-turner filled with vivid, deftly realized characters whom we care about and root for. The narrator is a courageous and wry young woman who, along with her adored but dangerously ill husband, finds herself besieged by the Walking Dead. (By the way, fans of the TV series The Walking Dead will enjoy this story, as it has much of the same immediacy, peril, and strong characterizations.) The author has given her heroine, Jillian, a clever, dry sense of irony: "Food: the (second) first thing a man thinks of upon waking." Jillian has long since lost faith in a government that, with grimly humorous understatement, describes victims of the Zombie Virus as "Subject to Change."Ms. Cooper-Brown packs a great deal of action, character, and emotion into this short work. Her writing is economical, articulate, and irreverent, as well as deeply touching. It's a shame, however, that the manuscript was not well-edited prior to publication. Some misprints, such as "chili" instead of "chilly" (an unfortunate goof, as it pulls the reader out of the story and immediately brings to mind the old joke,  "Chili today, hot tamale"), "West Minster Abbey" instead of "Westminster Abbey," and "his self" instead of "himself," are pretty jarring. Commas, semi-colons, and apostrophes are frequently missing or misplaced. These errors, undetected by SpellCheck, could easily have been corrected with a more thorough and professional proofread. Nevertheless, this is a quick, gripping read that is very well worth readers' time.