Time for another book review! This is one of the books that my Mr. put on my “hold” list at the library for me. Yes, my husband reserves books for me at the library. I find it rather romantic. I may in fact be terminally bookwormish.
My Mr. has a thing for the post-apocalyptic story…and Feed, by Mira Grant doesn’t fall far outside his wheelhouse. Lets talk ZOMBIES.
So the basic premise of this book (and the two after it, which I’ve also read and loved) is that in 2014 scientists will have developed viruses that will knock out the common cold and cancer. These are released into the world and combine in a wholly unexpected way, creating a new super-virus that infects…well…everybody and starts causing the dead to rise.
Don’t worry, these aren’t spoilers, this is all exposition that gets taken care of in the first few pages.
Basically, the government doesn’t quite understand what’s going on and, wanting to get a handle on it, suppresses the information…and the only reason anybody survives is because a scientist takes over his small daughter’s blog and leaks the information to the world. Chaos ensues, lots of people die, bloggers become celebrities/the main source of news, the world adjusts to living in more or less constant fear and the real meat of the story kicks in as we join our main characters 20 years later.
Through the three books, we follow bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason while they run around the country exposing corruption and conspiracy… and regularly poking zombies with sticks. They interact with a large cast of interesting, not-always-what-they-seem characters and generally come within inches of losing their lives every few pages or so. That’s kind of part of daily life after the zombie rising.
I don’t want to give you guys much more information than that about these books, because there are so many twists and turns in them that I’m afraid if I tried, I’d be too likely to spoil something for you. Let me just say instead that I highly recommend this series. When I mentioned in my review of The Paris Wife that I’d been somewhat ruined by a zombie book…this was it.
I have a little bit of a hard time saying that this series is fun…because honestly, with people dying left and right and then coming back as the undead, it IS really dark…but I can’t come up with a better word to describe it either. The zombies are a part of life…a daily part of life, and the characters have learned to live with them…and how to still have lives with love and humor in them despite the constant danger.
The writing on these books is fabulous. A little ways into the second or third book things start to get a little absurd, but you’re so far engrossed in the story, the characters and just enjoying yourself so much that you don’t mind the good-natured shark jumping. There is violence…quite a bit of it, but it’s treated tastefully. Death is common place, but it’s not crass. The books have the bones of an action/adventure, blow-em-up movie, but a lot more smarts piled on top.
All in all, unless you have a serious aversion to violence in your reading, I’d absolutely recommend this book, and, if you read it and you find you like it, you’ll be as delighted as I was to know that while Mira Grant hasn’t written anything beyond this series…the name is just a pen name for Seanan McGuire, who has. I’ll definitely be checking out more of her work!
Especially Creative Broad 