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BZRK by Michael Grant.
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)

It pains me to give a book by Michael Grant the same rating that I gave Sheepsquatch.

The plot of BZRK (and boy do I hate that title) was about a war. Two sides, one good and one bad, though it wasn't until the end that I even knew which was which (due to the writing, not because it was grey). Hell, I didn't even know the name of the other side until the halfway point of the book.

American Fancy Gift Corporation: The bad guys. Probably the best thing about this book was this dialogue exchange about the name:

"That doesn't sound like an evil organization setting out to dominate the world," Plath said.
"That's the idea," Ophelia said. "If you try telling someone the Armstrong Fancy Gift Corporation is taking over the world, they'll think you're crazy."

BRZK: The good guys. A bunch of teenagers who work for no one, get no pay, no living expenses, no living quarters, yet have access to the highest tech in the world (and for some reason use it to do good).

I'd describe the characters, but not a single one was memorable. I couldn't give a one-sentence description of more than a couple, even after reading the whole book.

The whole war took place through nanobots/on a microscopic level within human bodies. The good guys used biological nanobots while the bad guys used mechanical ones. For some reason when a biological nanobot was killed, it tended to drive its user insane. Don't ask me why the good guys used them over mechanical ones (angst?).

The book's first chapter was great. It started with a Bill Gates-type guy and his son. They were on a plane, when suddenly the pilot crashed them into a packed sports stadium (she had been infected with the bad guys' nanobots). The father and son were killed. The guy's daughter, who had been in the stadium and saw it all happening, survived. She now owned the whole company (think bigger than Microsoft with no shareholders -- she owned 100% of it). Yet somehow, even though she was now so important, she vanished to join BZRK. Oh, not really vanished, she still walked the streets of New York City, she just... walked away from the company? I just couldn't wrap my head around it. There was no mention of anyone on the streets recognizing her, no mention of the stock market crashing, nothing. Her whole background was mostly ignored from the second chapter on.

To call the characters one-note would be generous. Most of them had a one or two word description and that's about it. "Gay, liked to party". "Mother figure." "Enforcer." "Had pimples." One of the bad guys was the only one who had somewhat more characterization, and so unsurprisingly, he was the only one I liked.

The plot was slow, confusing, and had some pretty big holes. The characters were paper cutouts. The only positive thing about this book was the writing. If nothing else, Gone is a really good writer in a technical sense. I mentioned that paragraph a couple posts ago (about how men stare at women, but women only need a glance). There were others like that:

Plath's room looked like a miserable, run-down hotel where a drunk might spend his last days. Keats's room looked not unlike his room at home, except that it could do with an England poster. The rooms were identical.

And: [Her smile] was made of respect and fear and submission.

And: [She was] from one of those other islands where they do cool things to the English language.

Unfortunately, since I (usually) like Gone's books so much, I bought the first three in this series before reading this first one. I'll be deleting them unread. Bzrk was a joyless slog to get through, there's no way I want to continue with the series.

Bonus picture! I commissioned a new icon from

hamburger. Is this not the cutest thing ever?

What Will Come After by Scott Edelman
Rating: 5/loved (1-5/hated-loved)

First off, I think this may be the worst cover ever published. Bigger than I'd usually post so that you can see the details.

That's a picture of the author, and the text is the publisher.

Anyway, on to the review.

If I had known this was a zombie book, I would have left it at the bottom of my To Read pile. I'm very much over zombies; my interest in them waxed and waned with The Walking Dead.

It would have been my loss if I hadn't read this book.

Boy, did I love it. So many different takes on zombies! Nine short stories about them. And man, can this author write.

I loved the first story, What Will Come After, to death. The author played with tenses in a way that shouldn't have worked but that totally did. The main character was waiting to die, his world already taken over by zombies. The living knew some things about zombies, and he was listing them as he waited to pass, but somehow for each point he listed knowing, we saw into the future in an impossible way. Something like:

The first thing I know is that I will hunger.

I'll wander the streets of New York in a state of constant hunger. What I don't know is that zombies actually feel two kinds of hunger. The first is the kind we all know, for human flesh. But there's another hunger the living don't know about (blah blah blah).

The second thing I know is that I'll die apart from my wife.

We're living apart on purpose, because whichever dies first will turn on the other. I'll be the first to die, and then I'll rise and I'll search for her, in death not knowing...

I'm paraphrasing that whole section. It shouldn't have worked, I should have hated it, but it worked so well and I loved it.

There were stories told from the POV of living people and some told from zombies' POV. There was one great retelling of a classic novel with a zombie element. Which classic book it is is a spoiler -- it was so very fun to slowly pick up on the clues and go from "Interesting that he used those names" to "wait, isn't that.." to "No way, he's not setting this in that story..." to "IT IS! WOW!" The book was Of Mice and Men.

Edelman did something that always makes me want to kiss the author: He trusted his readers. He didn't lay out every detail and explain every little thing. In fact, there were some big holes in stories, like George shot Lenny, as he had in the book, but the shot wasn't clean and went through his throat instead of his brain (no zombies existed at that point). For some reason the author never explains, Lenny and all the small animals he killed by mistake all became zombies and all were following George. No one else in the world knew zombies existed. I love that he didn't explain that. I didn't need to know to enjoy the story.

There was only one story I didn't like, and that was because of the formatting (written like a script with stage directions in ALL CAPS and such). The style kept knocking me out of the story, so I skipped it. The final story was the shortest, just a couple pages long, and didn't work for me. But the other seven? I loved them!

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In other book news:

Seduced by WEREBEES /Taken by the Swarm won the poll (8 votes, next closest title, Educating the Platypus, had 4), so I think I'm going to slip it in next. It's so short, it shouldn't take me much time at all to read. (It pains me to pay $3 for something that's 11 pages long. What a ripoff! But I'm curious about it and it did win.)

Also, I got three new cat-with-book icons. I feel like I finally have enough negative ones and I already had enough positive ones, so I guess I need to stop getting new ones?