Ashley

This book sounds like it is written for me; zombies, talking animals, general hijinks. Unfortunately, I could not get into it! I just didn't care about any of the characters or what they were doing. It was also trying very hard to be funny and the humor just didn't land for me. The premise behind the zombies was very silly, although not very important to the plot so not a big deal.

My other issue was the writing itself. I felt like half of this book was just a list of different animals and the names for groups of animals. That combined with all the adjectives, similes, and metaphors, made this read like a high school English paper that had a very specific science prompt.

I really thought I was going to love this book, but it just didn't work for me.

I flew through this book and wanted to know what was going to happen to the boys next. The writing is pretty graphic, so if reading about wounds and blood and the like is going to make you put this book down, don't pick it up. I usually can't handle reading about these things, but because the book moves so quickly, the author doesn't linger on these scenes for too long and I was fine. The horror is definitely something you could see happening in real life which makes it that much more horrifying.

My issues were that the characters were all stereotypes. The troop leader is a single, adult man who lives alone with rumors in town that he might be gay. There is the fat, nerdy kid who you root for. There is the dumb jock whose dad is the chief of police and you want to grow out of this bullying phase. We have the angry kid whose dad is in jail. We have the normal kid with no stand-out characteristics. And very early on, we are clued into the fact that one of the boys is a socio/psychopath who likes to torture animals and is definitely going to be a problem as the boys try to survive the horror of the island.

Putting all these flat characters together just left me wanting to know how those that didn't survive the island died. I didn't really care who survived and who died, just how they did it. That was the most interesting part. I also felt like they didn't speak like 13 and 14-year old boys actually speak which didn't help my connection to the characters.

I still think this is a good book to read if you like “gross”, realistic horror, but I wish the characters had been fully developed.

I generally enjoy the worlds that Seanan Maguire puts together more than the characters themselves, but this was still a four-star book for me even though I felt the focus was on the main character rather than the world. The combination of the main character being torn between two worlds, something I became more and more invested in as the book went on, and the glimpses into a world where everything is “fair” and if it is not, there are interesting consequences, gave me a little bit of everything I wanted.

3.5 stars rounded down. I will continue on with the series because I think the characters and the world is interesting, but this first book was pretty confusing. I couldn't keep all the characters straight between at least two people from each of nine different houses and a lot of them felt like fodder. I am pretty tolerant to not knowing what is going on in fantasy books, but if I am at the end of the book still trying to remember who is who, that's not a great sign for me. That being said, I liked the story, the relationship between Gideon and Harrow, and the narratives for the characters.