Monday 8 April 2013

Book Review: Warm Bodies – Isaac Marion

It's quite unusual for me to read a book, I only read Mortal Engines because of the course and before that I hadn't read a book in about 10 years (not even exaggerating!) My sister recommended this book to me a few weeks ago and when I went to visit her this weekend, I managed to read the whole thing on the 3½ hour journeys between her house in Aberystwyth and my parents house in Stourbridge. So on the front cover it has a teenage couple, the guy is a zombie and the girl isn’t, it looks like really cheesy teen romance trash, especially as it has the caption “who says romance is dead?” by the side of this image. I wasn't very hopeful that this would be a good read, but I was pleasantly surprised – I guess “don't judge a book by it's cover” is very relevant here! (lol)

This offered an alternate view of zombies, normally I dislike zombie things, the films scare me and I cannot stand the games – it's all too real, but this book was comforting and ended up with the zombies actually curing their curses very slowly.
There is an element of romance in the story, but it's not overpoweringly soppy which is good, because I generally hate romantic things. Me and my boyfriend of 5 years don't celebrate Valentines day for example except maybe to take the piss, it's pointless, this is the card I gave him this year:
but I digress. I don't want to put too many spoilers in this review, but I found it very interesting reading through the zombies' point of view. It offered an explanation on why zombies only feed off living humans, and not each other or animals, once they turn into zombies they lose all recollection on who they are. They don't even know their own names, they are just lost and only have primal instincts, they also get visions of the person they are eating's life, so they feel more alive when they are eating as they feel human again for a few seconds. Something I always wondered about zombies is if they were humans that went back to primal instincts, like animals, why weren’t they trying to mate with everything as well? The book also explains this, they are primarily dead so they don't have a proper blood flow, but they do still have urges, resulting in them just standing there naked and staring at each other, as they don't know what to do and even if they did, nothing would happen!

This book has been made into a film apparently, which may explain the characters on the front cover of the book, as no where in the book does it say that the main zombie guy is wearing a hoodie and jeans, he's meant to be in a fitted shirt and tie which is why he cannot guess what he was before he turned into a zombie. I don't think that the film would be as good as the book, I can imagine that the directors would have played more on the teen aspect aiming at the kind of people that enjoy Twilight (I can gladly say I have never read or watched anything to do with Twilight, hearing about the sparkling put me off!)

So all in all, I would recommend this book, it's an easy read and good for people that enjoy post-apocalyptic things, zombies, and interesting stuff, it does have very descriptive violent scenes in places so it's not for the squeamish though!

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