Pages of Bookish Love is a new feature that Ashley and I (Alexa) are doing on our blogs. We each recommend one book to the other and then review the book on each other’s blog. For instance, Ashley recommended I read The First Days, as you can see my review is posted on her blog. In turn I recommended she read The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, which she will review on my blog. Basically we are exchanging pages of bookish love. We both hope you love this new monthly feature!
Title: The First Days
Author: Rhiannon Frater
Publisher: Tor
Publication Date: July 2011
Classification: Adult Horror Novel
Challenge: None
Summary from Goodreads:
The morning that the world ends, Katie is getting ready for court and housewife Jenni is taking care of her family. Less than two hours later, they are fleeing for their lives from a zombie horde.
Thrown together by circumstance, Jenni and Katie become a powerful zombie-killing partnership, mowing down zombies as they rescue Jenni’s stepson, Jason, from an infected campground.
They find sanctuary in a tiny, roughly fortified Texas town. There Jenni and Katie find they are both attracted to Travis, leader of the survivors; and the refugees must slaughter people they know, who have returned in zombie form.
Fast-paced and exciting, filled with characters who grab your heart, The First Days: As the World Dies is the beginning of a frightening trilogy.
Alexa’s Thoughts
I admit that I was a little afraid to start this one because, lets face it, horror is really really not my thing. I shy away from every horror movie out there and I do not do well at all with zombies. However, Ashley and I started exchanging books for this new feature so I decided to suck it up and let her have me read something that included zombies. I never expected she would go all world is ending due to zombies on me but, I went with it.
So when I started this novel I was a bit afraid, I thought I would be scared to turn every page and read the horror. I think I’m starting to become immune to some darker, more gore filled stories because this one didn’t really bother me with that aspect. Then again maybe most would consider this one pretty light in horror so who knows, I’m just glad that I could actually go to bed each night with no dreams of zombies having my brains for breakfast!
Once my fears started to go away I started to bond with our main characters, Katie and Jenni. Katie was a lawyer who went to work everyday to a high career and came home every night to her beautiful wife. Jenni lived in a hell-hole where her abusive husband would beat her and sometimes her kids, on the rare occasion where she couldn’t get there to stop his fist with her own face in time. On the day that the normal world ends Katie saves Jenni so this instantly makes these two bond. From here they have to try to find a way to live and it isn’t until they find a little hunting store in the middle of a small Texas hick town that they are able to get a little help. However, they must soon leave in order to get Jenni’s step son and battle their way through hordes of zombies to get to a camp in another small hick town that has been set up by some construction workers and their families.
Now for me the novel didn’t really get that interesting until Katie and Jenni were at the camp/wall/fortress that was created to help protect the small population of the town from the dead, glazed over, half eaten zombies, out in the world. One bite could make you into a zombie within minutes or days depending on the number of bites. This is where the book gets interesting and almost like a movie where the world ends. These people need to come together in order to create a new world, it will not be easy but they have no choice. They can either accept defeat and become mindless zombies themselves with just one bite or they can fight for their life, fight for the right to be among the living! Of course it is not easy to be among the living when family is on the other side of those walls, staring at you with their cold, dead eyes!
Overall, I did find some parts of the novel to be rather slow, not a lot is happening and it can grate on your nerves to just sit and twiddle your thumbs while these guys try to figure out living with zombies. Other times I was engrossed in the zombies who were trying to eat each character that I had started to feel for. I certainly felt for Katie, Jenni, Travis, and Juan. I felt their pain and I loved towards the end of the novel when they could finally find some things to joke about again, find some way to possibly live life, or so you think, never know really since more zombies are just around the corner. I did enjoy watching the camp come into being and the characters who lived there, never wanted to watch one of them get taken by the massive amounts of reanimated dead flesh, that was once their loved ones. So I do like the scary new world that Frater managed to create and I do admit that I feel for some of her characters. At the end of the day is this my kind of book? Well sadly, I would say it isn’t but it was still a good read, something to break up my string of YA romance! This book gets 4 hearts from me for a good look into the world of the unknown.
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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.