Undead
Undead by Kirsty McKay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I admit it, I picked this up because the cover looked like such a Buffy rip off. See what I mean
And wanted to see if it was a Buffy with zombies instead of vampires. No, it's not. It's not nearly as witty or as sarcastically funny. It wants to be (and the 'sound bites' on the cover say it is but it's really not). It doesn't help much that the main character is Bobby though she's not the cheerleader so who's that on the cover? Alice?
In fact the cover really makes zero sense but that's not really the author's fault so let me move onto the actual story. Bobby was born in England and moved to America when she was about ten then back to the UK. She's currently on a school ski trip in Scotland and it doesn't seem like she has a lot of friends being the new girl. She finds herself talking to Smitty, another outsider (by choice), sort of the bad boy of the school (naturally because this IS YA after all). They're at the ski resort's cafe where a man in a carrot costume is harassing people to try his carrot juice which neither of them do.
Almost immediately the action takes off and really never stops so that's the good part of this. Everyone in the cafeteria is dead. There's just Smitty and Bobby left alive and quickly they find two others, the nerdy (and oddly sociopathic) Pete and Alice, the head cheerleader popular girl stereotype (called Malice by just about all of them the entire book). Unfortunately their teacher and classmates don't stay dead. They become zombies of the slow shambling Night of the Living Dead type.
By sheer luck, the foursome manage to get the school bus to town only to find the zombies are already there and soon they're holed back up in the Cheery Chomper cafe where they at least have food and warmth as it's snowing. Not to mention that they've blown up the local gas station (where Pete gets a bad head wound that should have been better researched by author/editors because believable it is not). They try to parse out what is happening. Pete is sure that someone has purposely done this.
And he might be right but they are quickly forced from their safe hidey hole and out into the blizzard where they find more survivors and a Scottish castle. Here they might get some answers but they almost might get dead.
The story does wrap up the main thrust of this book, who/what/how the zombies are but it also ends in the middle of a potential action scene and I'm not sure I'll pick up the next to find out how this ends. Really this was a 2.5 read for me. I gave it three stars because well I'm just not into zombies and it's not as if it's badly written. It's just not really me. However, that said none of the characters really rise above their tropes. They embody those tropes full heartedly though. I liked that both Bobby and Alice are rather take charge kind of girls (the scream queen in this case being played by Pete) but I didn't really love either of them (or anyone for that matter). If you like zombie stories, you might like this. And oh, I put it under Sci-Fi rather than Urban fantasy because of the cause of the zombism.
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