Review of Deadline, by Mira Grant - peppered liberally with spoilers.

I wanted to like this book. I really did.


I read Feed, the first book in this trilogy, on the recommendation of a friend, and there were things about it that bothered me. I didn't love George's voice, she seemed to be trying way too hard to be edgy/angry. The book is about Kellis-Amberlee, a fairly well-thought-out virus that causes the dead to "amplify," or, as we're all used to hearing it, turn into zombies. Zombies have been around for a couple decades and even in Feed were not a huge part of the story, which was okay - the book is largely about the post-apocalypse culture of fear that we're left with, the extremely well-thought out ramifications of the virus (laws against dogs that are above the 40 lb. amplification thresholds, testing units to verify infection status being very much a part of hour-to-hour life, etc.), and, perhaps most importantly, blogging's shift to a medium that almost replaces the news, as the news sources were useless when the virus first broke, and bloggers helped people stay alive. They're now divided into Newsies (more serious, less action-oriented just-the-facts journalist types), Irwins (a cute nod to Steve Irwin - charismatic thrill-seekers who go play chicken with zombies for public entertainment), and Fictionals (writers of poetry and fiction to distract the public from their cloistered, secluded lives), and okay, that's interesting enough, but the first book dwelled entirely too much of division politics and technicalities for my preference. The characters in the first seemed a little underdeveloped, some more than others, but it had redeeming qualities. George's death was truly a powerful emotional scene, and I was invested enough to care when Buffy betrayed the group and died. It had flaws, but it had an interesting enough plot and enough strong scenes to keep my interest and make me check the next book, Deadline, out of the library.


Reading Deadline was kind of like...I don't know, putting a fairly sweet zombie book at the center of a horde of slow-moving zombies that you have to wade through to get to the good book, only the good book turns out to be about 3 pages long. The plot was just interesting enough to make me suffer, trudge, and "Are you kidding me?" my way through 581 pages of abysmal, repetitive, at times just insulting writing, and it was kind of a waiting for the punchline thing. This crap has to improve in the next chapter, right? No?


I don't even know how to write this, it was so terrible. I think I have to make a list.


- Shaun. Christ, I hate him. He is childish, immature, obnoxious, one-dimensional, repetitive, crazy, but you don't need to tell him that he's crazy, other people already do, as we're told on almost every single page. He's supposed to be an angry, brooding character, so he punches walls and other objects routinely, and occasionally his staff. Shaun really doesn't even feel like an angry sort of guy, he's generally been painted as somewhat happy go lucky, slightly reckless, so the "Shaun is angry now, and you know it because he hits stuff" development is absurd and juvenile. His exaggerated sarcasm is so overdone that it makes him sound like a fifteen year old trying on sarcasm for the first time.


- Shaun still talks to George in his head, and naturally, she talks back. Mira Grant really, truly fell into the soap opera trap of "This character is such a fan favorite and I just killed her off, so she can return as my long-lost twin/ghost that haunts me/star of innumerable dream sequences/voice in my head who oh, also, is nearly nothing like her character was." When the hell was George this supportive, helpful person who "made soothing noises" to calm Shaun down? The storyline absolutely never does anything but fill space and waste the reader's time. He tells us every few pages that his team "is used to" him talking (out loud - out loud, seriously, he states that she hears him even when he doesn't talk, so why does he still say everything, all the time, at even the most inappropriate moments, out loud? Attention seeking?) to his dead sister, yet they give him odd looks or ask him to repeat himself every time. It gets old, older than old, by the end of the first chapter, and then continues. For the whole book.


- One-dimensional characters. Dave died, and I don't even remember who the hell Dave was, so I really don't care. Maggie is endearing, Becks has a hint of a personality that is never explored, Mahir and Alaric are basically interchangeable, and the only tension I could find it in myself to mildly care for is whether Mahir's wife is going to leave him. That would be unfortunate. You can tell that I feel passionately about the issue.


- Filler. If I had a dollar for every time they told us completely and totally and utterly unnecessarily what order the group entered a building or where they sat around a table ("We walked in, with Becks leading the group, Alaric behind her, Maggie trailing along and me bringing up the back" - why couldn't that just say "We walked in"?), I bet I'd have, oh at least $581 dollars. The time spent in this book on driving, walking, sitting, maintaining equipment, or muttering under breath is, basically, the whole book. Add in commentary about the Shaun talking to his dead sister situation and yeah, it's the whole book. The. Whole. Book.


- The gross underuse of Kelly. Kelly could have been an interesting character. I'd like to know what her motivations, feelings, thought processes were. She is not an interesting character for one single sentence. While we're there, Dr. Wynne was so briefly developed in the first book that it's neither surprising nor expected nor interesting when he turns into the evil scientist in this book. It's just "Oh, he's evil now. Well, shit." And of course, he reveals his evil plans in great detail before trying to kill our main "characters." To the book's credit, it does take a jab at itself and the genre here: "'Why is it you assholes always feel the need to tell the media your evil plans before you kill us?' asked Becks. 'Is it a union requirement or something?'" in one of the only entertaining lines in this book.


- Let's just get it out there: the incest. I'm not into it. It's gross. It's weird. The hints at it in Feed, from George's perspective...I could've really done without it, but at least in George's voice you could at least feel some affection, connection...sincerity. From Shaun is just feels like desperately creepy co-dependance. And if you're going to include an incestuous sub-plot, spit it out. Don't tip-toe around it. Even after Deadline, it's never blatantly, explicitly, without a shadow of a doubt confirmed, just implied so strongly there's no ignoring it, and that impresses me even less.


- There's a "second rising." Cities are wiped out. There's so little tension or genuine horror that it's nearly impossible to care.


- The first direct encounter with a zombie is on page 555. If the rest of the book were readable, I would excuse this. It is not. It's a brief encounter - a page or two.  We hear some zombies around a corner and down a hallway, but we don't see them. Zombie deer are extremely briefly mentioned, and hell, zombie deer would've been a fairly entertaining interlude. If they'd cut out a page or two of George's voice in his head or seating arrangements they could've made a detour and talked about it.


I could probably go on all day, but I'm so over this book that I've probably said enough.

Since I last reviewed Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson in October, I've read five (and a half) books. I meant to review each one, but it hasn't happened.

 Plain Truth, by Jodi Picoult.

I never wanted to read Jodi Picoult, her books seemed too churned-out to me. I just pictured her sitting down to her computer, rolling up her sleeves, and saying "Time to write another family drama tear-jerker." But that's me being an asshole - a book should be about whether you enjoy it while you're reading it, and if she can write a good book a day, then so be it. My mother owned all of her books, and when I ran short on reading material a year or so ago she loaned me My Sister's Keeper. I read a few more and a few more until I'd read, at this point, I think all but 3-4, and to me they've been hit and miss. I hated Keeping Faith, loved Nineteen Minutes, and so on. Plain Truth fell between the two. I came away from it feeling like a judgmental "Englischer" with a new understanding of Amish culture. In the book, Katie Fisher is an 18 year old Amish girl who is accused of birthing, and killing, a baby in the family's barn in the middle of the night when the dead infant is found in the morning and Katie is proven to have recently given birth. She continues to deny not just the death but also the birth, even as she's reluctantly defended by Ellie Hathaway, a big city criminal defense attorney who, in my opinion, absolutely never rings true. She's supposed to be "disillusioned," but the only way we ever see that is because we're told, "This is Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned lawyer." She's supposedly been toiling away for years and years with an insensitive boyfriend who won't take the next step in their relationship, defending hardened criminals and throwing up in the bathroom when she gets pedophiles acquitted. I just don't buy it. She shows herself to be, actually, rather sensitive almost from the first page, and her epiphanies and changes of heart feel extremely lackluster and predictable. Katie's stubbornness juxtaposed with her sometimes incredibly frustrating naivete can seem unbelievable - she relates to Ellie on levels involving relationships and parenting that seem too precocious for someone who is absolutely unable to grasp the simplest workings of the English law system no matter how many times they're repeatedly explained. All in all, I think that it was a very well-researched book - the look into Amish culture was absolutely the book's strong point, to me. Some of the characters (Ellie Hathaway in particular) seem a little too set up and contrived, but it held my attention and it was an interesting read.

The Postmortal, by Drew Magary. 

Now this was an interesting (depressing, dark, horrifying, thought provoking) book. It's 2019, a cure for aging has been discovered. It's illegal at first, but that's almost a pointless part of the plot, it doesn't stay illegal. John Farrell, a lawyer, although his original career is rarely really a part of things, rushes to get "the cure" from a doctor giving them out illegally in his home, and remains 27 (I think it was 27? 20-something) permanently. The author provides enough of a scientific explanation for how the cure works to easily allow suspension of disbelief so that we can move on to the real meat and potatoes of the book - social implications. "Cycle marriages" become a thing - you sign up for a marriage that you know is going to end in 40 years, divide your assets in a way that you'd previously agreed upon, and move on - or, if you'd like, you can renew your contract. Forever being truly indefinite, not "until we start aging in 10 or 20 years and die in 60" changes everything about how people relate to one another. Commitment is scoffed at, people raise a set of children and then 30 years later raise a new set. "End specialists" - government sanctioned euthanasia providers - become common. Some barely-explained "greenies" crop up - troll-like men who terrorize, mutilate, and kill people who have received the cure - I hated that entire plotline, it's never really explained who they are, how exactly they're green (simple body paint?), why they're always short and bald (what if there's a tall guy willing to throw lye at people and dye himself green? Is he not allowed?). Not surprisingly, people are continuing to live and reproduce while dying at a much less frequent rate (the cure only prevents aging - not murder, suicide, cancer, accident, etc.), so the earth's resources are being stretched far beyond their capacities. Pregnant women are being killed in the streets, because the last thing the world needs is more mouths to feed. A culty new religion, Church of Man, has formed, more or less on the premise than mankind discovered the cure for aging, so we are who we should be worshiping. People realize, oh shit, I can never retire now. Rich people are stockpiling food and weapons in underground bunkers. People are living in caravans on the side of the road. I think that the biggest compliment that I can give this book is the subtle change in the main character's voice - you don't notice it happening, but when you finish the book (60+ years after John has received the cure), then go back and read the first chapter (in blog-entry form), he sounds so much more innocent, less jaded, cleaner than he ultimately does, but it's a very gradual change. The end of the book gets more grim than the cartoonish book cover would suggest - I mean truly, miserably depressing and disturbing - but this is one hell of an interesting read. Unfortunately, I was much more interested in the stories of John's father and sister - both reluctant to receive the cure. In his father's case, it's because his wife has already died before  the cure was discovered, and there's no reason for him to prolong being with her. He ultimately gets the cure and regrets it bitterly. His sister is married with small children when it's discovered, and her very minor side-story as her husband becomes interested in a cycle marriage and her children grow up stay the same age forever was, to me, far more interesting than John's ongoing relationship strife and bad decisions, but that's probably just because I'm a woman in a long-term relationship who will have children soon, and stories you can relate to are always more interesting. All in all, it's a book well worth reading.

Spook - Science Tackles the Afterlife, by Mary Roach.

There isn't a whole lot to review about this one - the subject matter interests you or it doesn't, and Mary Roach's writing style appeals to you or it doesn't. I'd already read Stiff (about death) and Bonk (about sex research) by the same author and loved them, so naturally I read this one too. Her books are, always, extremely well researched and well cited, extremely accessible to Joe Public, and darkly, dryly funny. This one was no exception.

Goodnight, Beautiful by Dorothy Koomson.

I started this book because, for reasons that escape me, the summary on the back of the book caught my eye in Target and I put it on my library list. When it came in, I thought "Why the hell did I request this book?" but started reading anyway. I was tripping on British dialect a little, but I liked it well enough, or was intrigued, anyway, and looked up reviews online a chapter or so in because I am an absolute review junkie. I was completely disappointed to realize that it was the same author and a very similar premise as My Best Friend's Girl, which I guess I didn't hate, but it was not amazing. I kept reading and was pleasantly surprised. Mal and Nova are best friends - it's soon revealed that grew up together, quite literally from birth, and were raised practically as siblings (Nova's parents cared for their mentally unstable friend and neighbor's children, Mal being one of them), with a long-running unrequited love that neither knew was mutual. Mal grows up and marries Steph, who is infertile (or is she?) and also mentally unstable and badly wants a baby. Long-suffering Nova ends up agreeing to be a surrogate for them, only to be left twisting in the wind when Mal admits his feelings for her and Steph's festering insecurity and instability explodes, leading her to cut Nova and the baby out of their lives. 8 years later, the child, Leo, is in a coma, and Mal and Steph are still married, miserably, and childless. Everyone starts to come apart at the seams, and I was amazed at how the author managed to develop the characters so well that their seemingly inexplicable or ridiculous decisions seem perfectly in character and make total sense within the context of the story. You can write a story and say "And then he did this, and then she said that, and then this happened," and it will never have an impact if you can't feel what they're feeling, and understand their motivations and what led them to do the things they did. This book would've been a prime candidate for that - why can't Nova and Mal just get it together and date each other? Why would Steph even ask Nova to be a surrogate if she's been jealous of her from day one? Why the hell did Nova agree? Why is Steph so crazy? Why did Mal allow himself to lose his best friend and his child? Any of those are so outlandish that they could've easily, easily derailed the whole story, but every decision feels natural and makes sense in context. The ending is sad and unsatisfying, but making decisions as bizarre as those fully understandable is a feat that alone makes the book worth reading.

Finding Fish: A Memoir, by Antwone Q. Fisher.

Finding Fish was a book that Mary had around that she'd had to read for school, and suggested I read it. It sat around until I had a dry spell between library runs; I wasn't as interested as I wanted to be. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I had a messed up childhood myself, but I could relate to very little of Antwone's experiences (foster care, the 60's and 70's, African American culture, male perspective), but his voice is so strong and honest that it's impossible not to root for him as he builds his own moral compass from scratch and tries to find his way out of his abusive foster home. It's rarely about grotesque, gratuitous abuse (not never, just rarely), and more about a lack of love, support, or belonging. By the time he's out of the house and in the Navy, the book could say "And then he became a millionaire, and married a supermodel, and had five wonderful kids, and was waved by palm leaves and fed grapes all day" and you would keep reading just because the author is so genuine and likable, he deserves happiness and peace and it's truly enjoyable to read about him finding it. I tend to stay interested throughout the central struggle of a book and by the time it gets to the happily ever after, I'm thinking "Yeah, yeah, and then you were happy and blah blah blah, that's great," but this one, if he wrote another book about nothing but his happy life now, I'd read it. 

Robopocalypse - Daniel H. Wilson

I accomplished basically nothing today other than scrapbooking (which was, frankly, lackluster) and finishing this book, so here it is. There'll be some minor spoilers, but the book is almost entirely about the how, not the if. The major plot points are revealed on the jacket - there's a robot uprising. Smart phones, smart cars, smart dolls, all of our technology (and some that doesn't yet exist) turns on us on an epic scale, from cars running down humans by the dozen to "stumpers," small machines that wait for a warm body to pass by, then latch onto your leg and blow it off.


The first half of the book, which centered on "Zero Hour" and the isolated glitches and events leading up to it, was terrifying. It had me awake at 1am, eyeing my computer apprehensively. I haven't encountered a book with the scary, paranoia-inducing quality of a good horror movie in quite a while - without images, music, spooky camera angles, it's just harder for a book to grab hold of you and keep you awake, and at least in the first half, this one did.


To me, things came unraveled somewhat in the latter half. The author has a Ph.D in robotics, and although he didn't delve so deeply into techno-speak that it became inaccessible, some descriptions that in his eyes probably added to the chilling tone of the book may have been better appreciated by his colleagues than the general public. Phrases like "disposable sentry turrets," "massive bridge crane," are most likely terrifying in context, but without a point of reference for technical details, some of it was probably lost.


The story also gets away with several things that were too convenient, such as a cryptic exchange between an elderly Japanese man and his robot companion that inexplicably leads to numerous humanoid robots experiencing an "awakening" and becoming sentient and individually thinking (you may be thinking "Aren't they all sentient, isn't that the point?" but no, they're all more or less under the control of the central intelligence, Archos). I'm not sure if I missed something here, or if the entire chapter followed no clear logic and the "awakening" could have been more easily explained with an author's note in place of the chapter that just said "The humanoid robots are sentient now, because I damn well said so. It's the only way I can get around the radioactive well in the next chapter."


The place that the book truly succeeds is on the human level. The individual losses and horrors that specific people experience are gut-wrenching. The story is told from multiple perspectives as seen in various surveillance videos and interviews that had been collected by a robot and found by a soldier at the end of the war, and it works very well for the most part, save for the inevitable issue of not fleshing out each character fully. From my perspective it was that or stunting it to one person's perspective of a global apocalypse, so it was a sacrifice well worth making. In several chapters they follow one person or family, get the reader wrapped up in rooting for them and horrified at the atrocities they see along the way, and at the end of that perspective, the detached notation "No further record of Laura Perez exists" is simple but absolutely chilling.


Overall, I think that it hits and misses equally, in different areas. The book loses some steam just when it should be picking some up, but the first half of the book alone is well worth the read.