Alice in Zombieland

“Can you tell I was a depressed, neurotic mess?”

In a nutshell, Alice in Zombieland is a glorified high school love story. And a rather annoying and cringe-worthy one at that.

When you read the synopsis and look at the cover of the book, it sounds like a darker, zombiefied version of Alice in Wonderland. I for one am a fan of retellings, and so when I heard about this, I figured it was right up my alley.

I was wrong.

Instead, I got love story with few similarities to Alice in Wonderland. In a retelling, it is critical to have the perfect amount of similarities. Alice in Zombieland lacks similarities to Alice in Wonderland, and I didn't feel that it was a retelling in any way to the latter.

Once I realized it wasn't quite what I was expecting, I tried to change my mindset to fit with the story. I still didn't like it, unfortunately.

For starters, the love is such a bad case of insta-love it's not even funny. And it grossed me out, to be honest. For example, our lovely main character Ali first sets eyes on the love interest, Cole Holland, on page 55. By page 90, Kat, Ali's friend, is already speaking of how Cole practically ‘ate her up' with her eyes. And yes, I know, we find out later in the book that Cole and Ali have some freaky premonition stuff going on when they look at one another, but still. It was too much, too fast.

As for the characters, I didn't particularly love any of them. Were they awful? No. Were they fantastic? No. The main character was kind of annoying, but I didn't hate her. Her love? Yes, I did hate that, but I've already talked about that.

The zombies were very disappointing. I mean, zombie ghosts? No. I want brain-sucking, gory zombies. Walking Dead zombies. So yes, I was a bit mad about that.

There are other things that bothered me, but I think I've butchered this poor book enough. Although I wasn't a fan of 99% of the book, the writing was very good. Gena Showalter is a good writer, if nothing else.

All in all, this book was a big disappointment for me. It had very high ratings and an intriguing synopsis, but it lacked in too many departments.

“Because of him, I'd learned to survive this new world. More than that, I'd learned how to overcome it.”