Warm Bodies
By Isaac Marion
Published: 1/2010 by Atria
From Goodreads:
R is a young man with an existential crisis–he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, noidentity, and no pulse, but he has dreams.
After experiencing a teenage boy’s memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and stragely sweet relationship with the victim’s human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.
Scary, funny, and surprisingly poignant, Warm Bodies is about being alive, being dead, and the blurry line in between.
The Bookish Brunette thought:
Warm Bodies is a very DIFFERENT kind of zombie book than this Brunette is used to reading. That’s not in all actuality a BAD thing, but there are certain aspects that I feel it necessary that one must posses to REALLY be called a zombie. And “feelings” isn’t one of them. Sorry.
Some of you may be recalling a few of my past reviews, such as: Zombies Don’t Cry by Rusty Fischer and Dearly Departed by Lia Habel and you may be calling me a hypocrite. Well, just HOLD THE PHONE a minute. There is a WORLD of difference between these three zombie books! Then why compare them you ask? (you guys like how I argue your side with myself don’t you????) Let it be known before I go off on my big rant of an explanation, that I don’t like comparing books to each other (and RARELY do so) but I feel it’s appropriate in this case to fully get my point across!
In Zombies Don’t Cry, YES, Maddy does in fact have “feelings”. But Zombies Don’t Cry is a Young Adult, comedic and light-hearted take on the zombie book genre in general! Maddy DIES, and comes back to life. She’s not BITTEN, or attacked by a rabid, man eating, plague ridden, once human THING… So really it’s in an entirely different league and I shouldn’t compare the two, right?
Wrong.
When I started Warm Bodies, all I knew for CERTAIN was that it was told from a zombie’s perspective. OMG right?! I mean seriously- we always get the HUMAN’S side of the apocalypse, how freaking badass to get to hear it told from a ZOMBIE’S aspect?!
Turns out… Not so much badass, as WTF?!
‘R’ is our (hero?) main character, he is a zombie. A real zombie. Like a rotting, “eat your face off”, brain licking zombie. Sexy right? And he’s QUITE philosophical for a member of the walking dead. I mean, he could’ve been ALIVE, non-rotty and doubled for Charlie Hunnan and I still would have rolled my eyes and told him to SHUT UP!!!!
Well… I may have asked him to please talk more quietly, so I could enjoy the view. Just sayin.
“Once you arrive at the end of the world, it hardly matters what route you took.”
…or how many people you ATE on the way there right?
Then we hear about his boring zombie days and routine…
“Eating is not a pleasant business. I chew off a man’s arm, and I hate it. I hate his screams, because I don’t like hurting people, but this is the world now.”
As we get FARTHER into Warm Bodies, I get more and more irritated by this OVER-analytical zombie guy who feels it necessary to question every SINGLE, SOLITARY detail of his life. DUDE. YOU. ARE. A. ZOMBIE. That’s it. Deal with it, and MOVE ON.
I also have to mention his zombie wife (who he catches having an “affair”), adopted zombie kids (because his JUNK isn’t functional.) Um… THANKS. See? For me, Warm Bodies went WAY beyond “fiction” into completely freaking RIDICULOUS.
Alas, the story continues… On a “hunting” trip (you know… Where they ‘hunt’ and EAT people and such) R saves a human girl from being an entree and brings her back to his zombie “home”.
Help me.
And on, and ON, AND ON it goes… until the complete and absolute ridiculousness that I mentioned earlier is quadrupled as R begins to start displaying humanistic type traits and at this point I’m only still reading because I’m utterly DUMBFOUNDED by what everyone loves so much about this book.
Now, there’s no doubt Isaac Marion can WRITE a beautiful story and Warm Bodies was indeed different from ANYTHING I’ve read before or since. Did I HATE IT? No… Warm Bodies was alright, in a completely WTF kind of way.
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Book loving, zombie freak, stiletto wearing, twitter whore, coffee addicted Brunette with a purse fetish.
Collector of flamingo paraphernalia & zombie keepsakes… Frequenter of thrift stores... cRaFtY bitch... and I match my eye-shadow to my outfit - everyday.