Feedback by Mira GrantMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
My status updates seem to indicate I’m all excited and stuff about reading a zombie book starring, as main character (a non-zombie), a lesbian. And how I felt sad about avoiding this book because I thought it was a repeat of a book I’d already read. So how’d we end up here? At a rating of 3.somethingthatputsitonthe3.5shelf?
The book started off strong – the book opens, if I recall correctly, with the lead character perched on top of a statue like a bird – for a really long time. She was waiting for her friend/fellow co-worker/husband to exit from his mother’s funeral. The police kept driving by while Ash, that woman on the statue, was sitting on the statue. Eventually the police stop to question her, and she uses her press badge to make them continue on their way – for, you see, the press have certain privileges not seen by the common man (it is otherwise illegal to loiter, and while that type of thing is on many law statutes today, it tends to only be used in certain circumstances –it really gets used here, though, because this is a world filled with zombies. It is just too dangerous to loiter).
Eventually the funeral guests leave, get in their cars, and rush out. And, even more eventually, that husband fella, Ben, comes out. He stops to banter with Ash, then make a call. All the while I’m kind of alternating screaming at him to stop being an ass and actually get in a car, and confusion (alternating screaming and confusion). As might be expected in this type of situation, Ben and Ash get swarmed by mobs of zombies because Ben is too stupid to get into cars and pay attention to the world around him. Luckily for him, Ash is there to save him. See, beginning starts off strong.
Husband? Lesbian main character? Something doesn’t seem to compute, eh? Ireland, apparently, has rocketed back from any progressive stances it has taken in our world to one of ultra-conservativism, ultra-religious, ultra-women-are-for-making-babies. And Ash wants nothing to do with that world. But, see, she’s Irish. Long story short (and really, there is a long story here I’m cutting short), Ash and Ben hook up in an arrangement so that Ash could get to the USA and become a citizen. 1) Ash is still a lesbian despite being married to a man; 2) technically it’d be somewhat easier for Ash and Ben to get an annulment than others since they’ve never consummated their marriage; 3) and Ash & Ben happen to live with a woman named Audrey who is Ash’s long-time girlfriend (meet in USA). So Ash is more than just a ‘lesbian in name only’.
Right, so, strong beginning, interesting characters, interesting enough plot – so how’d I end up giving a rating of only 3.5? Simple enough: somewhere along the line the book took an odd turn, well two actually – one involved the group going down the same path the Masons went down (the Masons being the main characters in the main Newsflesh series); and two – the odd turn I specifically was going to mention was the part where some really stupid, cliché, and ‘Walking Dead’ type stuff started to happen to the Ash team ((view spoiler)). Before that, though, right before the team – like the Masons – went on the run, there’s this extra special moment wherein the group, who up to that point had learned nothing super bad or overly suspicious, get loaded down with lots of stuff they shouldn’t know, and therefore have to run for their lives because they know it (seriously, one second the team knows basically nothing that’d get anyone into trouble, the next some dick doctor is there to tell them all the super-secret stuff going on in the world for . . . no known reason; after which their life is worth less than a paper bag and they have to go on the run.
From that moment on – being told stuff – to everything that came after that point – everything just became too absurd to be acceptable or readable. I literally had to start skimming there near the end, and when I had hit the wrong button and accidentally thought the next-to-last chapter was the last chapter I didn’t even really blink. That would have been a crap ending, but by that point I was ready for things to be over. Then, of course, I realized I’d clicked a link by accident on my book reader and gone to the afterward part, backed up to read the actual ending and realized – this book really does just kind of die. Just . . . pfft, fuck it – book over now ‘the end’.
Rating: 3.5
December 18 2017
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