Interesting idea. I enjoy the fact that it deals with rebuilding society, which is something I don't see very often. I continue to enjoy the blog where the story is still going on today. ( )

I didn't review the book the first time I read it, because I read it for my online radio show, Journal Jabber, and I didn't want to give my own opinion on the book in a review until later. I didn't want to influence anyone with my own written opinion. We were doing a show on zombie books, and this one caught my attention. Not sure why... The cover wasn't gory, the zombies weren't all beat to hell and nasty looking, and it wasn't an overly clever title. But maybe that's WHY it caught my attention. That is was simple. Straight to the point. It was a zombie book. Nothing more. Nothing less. And that is what you get. A zombie story.

Not with as many shambling dead and head crushing as you would imagine, but it focuses a lot on a community of survivors. How they lived, what they faced. And not all bad vibes and nasty juju are coming from the brain-starved reanimated. The tension comes from within. From people just being people. We bond together when we need to survive, but we have this nasty habit of trying to tear ourselves apart for no good reason... simply because we think we can and that our own opinions and thoughts mean and count more than other people's. I loved this take on the zombie world. We see zombie's rip arms off all the time. We see axes cleave furrows in squishy bodies, but we rarely see what WE would do should that ever happen.

This book is written blog style from a guy named Josh, with occasional posts from Courtney, and Tree. As an editor by trade, there were several things that screamed at me, "NO!!! This is ALL telling and no showing... There are grammatical errors everywhere!!" But ya know what? It freaking works. It's a blog. This guy is living in a life where he is worried about dying every day. I like that fact he wasn't worried about reciting conversations word for word or trying to entertain. It was very lifelike in some ways. In other ways, I feel like it was just a bit forced. *SPOILERS AHEAD* A few of these things would be this:
1. I don't know about you, but if my significant other was screaming at me in an emergency, I would NOT be worried about finishing up the last part of my blog and giving any kind of sign off for it. If there were zombies coming at my home or people I cared about, I would be dropping that laptop/cell phone and booking it to where ever I needed to be. I understand the reasoning for it - it amped up the tension a bit, but it lost the touch of reality for me in certain parts.
2. and this kinda sorta ties into my previous post - if he is out and about on missions, he is not going to have his little sign offs - just not gonna happen. But the other thing that made me a bit "eh" on his cell phone posts was his lack of text speak. I know this may sound strange, but hear me out. If you are writing an entire blog post from your cell phone in the midst of danger, I would think that writing something like "We R here" or "U R what U eat" (neither, I will add are really in the book) would be more realistic for him to write on his cell than spelling everything out. He's obviously not overly concerned with people reading this later in the future where, hopefully, grammar holds more importance in everyday communication. He's worried about getting his messages out there... FROM A CELL PHONE... :)

Did either of these points kill the story for me? Nope. The one part that made me laugh out loud was the naming of the more evolved zombies. I kept getting the munchies every time I read about it. For those of you who have read the book, you will know what I mean. :) I will be starting book two tomorrow, and I am happy to see there are 6 books in the series now, so I will have some zombie enjoyment for quite some time. ( )