Title - Alice in Zombieland
Author - Gena Showalter
Summary -
Alice Bell doesn't live a normal teenage life. With a paranoid and fearful father, Alice and her sister are not allowed to go out at night. They are not allowed to even play outside unattended. Her social life is nil and at school her and her sister are outcasts. But that is all going to change. On her sixteenth birthday she asks her parents for one thing and only one. To watch her sister dance in the school play, after dark. One night, outside the house, after dark and then everything changed.
"...My names is Alice Bell, and on the night of my sixteenth birthday I lost the mother I loved, the sister I adored and the father I never understood until it was too late. Until that heartbeat when my entire world collapsed and a new one took shape around me.
My father was right. Monsters walk among us..."
That night her family is in a one car accident and her sister, her mother and her father are killed. Alice is lost to a coma for weeks. But what she doesn't tell the police and what they don't tell her is that the bodies of her mother and father were mutilated beyond the results that could have come from the accident. As if something had come upon them and begun to feed. What Alice doesn't tell them is that she had been awake at that time and she saw what came for her parents.
Alice's father had been terrified of monsters that came out at night. Creatures that would haunt him until his dying day. Alice knows that these creatures exist and that they killed her family. But she also knows that no one will believe her and so she keeps quiet. Sent to her grandparents to live. Alice must prepare herself for the day she will face these creatures.
But for now there are even worse creatures to face. A new high school. New friends and enemies and a young boy who knows more about her and what lurks in the night than he is letting on. Alice must decide who she can trust and who she cannot in her battle to face what comes out only at night.
Review -
Gena Showalter's foray into teen paranormal drama is fresh and inventive. Her adult novels rely heavily on the sexual themes to help drive them, which she doesn't use in her teen books and it is refreshing to see that she can absolutely create a story with pace and tempo without the adult themes.
Alice Bell is the lost awkward teen whose grief drives her forward to discover what it is that truly killed her parents and sister. She knows what she saw cannot exist but she also knows that her father was afraid of this very thing all her life.
The zombies in Showalter's novel are not the of the flesh eating variety but rather spirits who attack their victims in the spirit world and whatever damage they afflict there, manifests itself in the real world. Alice must learn to fight them in this spirit world to defeat them and protect what is left of those she loves.
If there is a negative in the story is that it only relates to Alice in Wonderland in name alone. There is little correlation between this tale and the class story. I had hoped that Showalter would have used more of the background of the Alice in Wonderland story to set the background for her novel. Perhaps that will show in the next book.
A good well paced read.
No comments:
Post a Comment