Crawl on me. Sink into me. Die for me. Living dead girl.

First of all, this cover is great. But the content inside is kinda… prosaic? It’s a simple read. There’s nothing flowery or striking about the prose. It’s just pretty much a straight urban fantasy with not a whole lot of plot or high stakes. There’s no build-up to something. It’s more slice of life. Writing for the masses. For entertainment.

The concept is really really close to iZombie, even though this came years before that. They’re both undead people (but not quite undead, they just have 10 bpm heart rates), both eat brains (as opposed to flesh), both work in a morgue, both eat the brains they get from the morgue, both help the cops solve murders, if you don’t eat brains quick enough you become the rotting mindless kind of zombie, both have an underground zombie society/black market. I wonder if Rob Thomas gleaned more from this than from the comic book of the same name.

My problem is the white trash part of her life and the zombie part of her life never mix together to create a synergistic plot. There are scenes dedicated to her alcoholic father, run-down house, drug habit, etc. And there are scenes where she’s working as a morgue technician. And the two never see each other. It’s like two separate stories are going on just to justify the title/hook. Zombie-ness/undeadness doesn’t factor into her life. She hides it too well and it’s never an obstacle. So I enjoyed this for what it is, but I’m not interested enough to read the sequels. ( )

This was my first [a:Diana Rowland|852078|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1235174372p2/852078.jpg] book, so I had no expectations whatsoever. I'm not going to describe the plot nor write spoilers.



Before reading the book I LOVED it's cover. In fact I picked it up solely because of it's cool pink zombie cover. I mean look at it! It's pink, with a beautiful woman, piercings, blood, don't-give-a-damn look...what's not to like?
But I must admit it, again because of the cover I didn't expect it to be any good. I was just in the mood for a bad paranormal romance novel as my weekly guilty pleasure that also happened to have a cover I enjoyed looking at. A book that would be fun but badly written. A B-Movie type of book.

Now that I finished not only this but also the second book in the series I can say that the cover is definitely they worst part of the book. I wish it was different because it doesn't represent the content and makes it look "cheaper" than it actually is.
Am I making sense?

The novel is written in a first person perspective, which means that we get a lot of "telling" instead of "showing". The protagonist seems very real and Rowland has not tried to do her any favors in order to score points with the readers. She is a white trash girl with a melodramatic story that manages to balance between being moving and cheesy pretty well.

The romance part is barely visible, which is one of the things I loved in this book. I was really afraid that it was going to be like the Parasole Protectorate series (too much fuss about a mystery we don't really care about because we all know it's just a pretense to hide the fact that the main theme is the romantic story). But thankfully it wasn't. The romance was not an end in itself but a natural and logical sequence of the events that took place. It wasn't the main focus of the novel either. The focal storyline was a mystery! Ok it was a weak mystery (the second novel [b:Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues|12766833|Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues (White Trash Zombie, #2)|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328080041s/12766833.jpg|17910832] almost excels in that department) but it was fun!

I read that [a:Diana Rowland|852078|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1235174372p2/852078.jpg] has worked as a morgue assistant, detective, crime scene investigator etc and IT SHOWS! This was one of the most pleasant things in the book. I just began reading [b:Married With Zombies|7716140|Married With Zombies (Living with the Dead, #1)|Jesse Petersen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1265814659s/7716140.jpg|10450081], where the couple says that they'll use zombie movies as a reference material to fight the undead and it made me chuckle because Rowland does the exact opposite. She describes, through the eyes of Angel -her protagonist- how everything is different from the tv-shows and movies, less glamorous and more real. That constant note of realism throughout the novel makes it even more exciting and even rubs off some of it onto the whole...zombie thing.

And now that I finally came to the zombies let me say this: I HATE it when they make zombies smart. I am a huge zombie fan and I want my zombies brainless dammit! I have read stuff that try to have a new take on the zombie thing and utilize smart zombies, like [b:Warm Bodies|7619057|Warm Bodies|Isaac Marion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1323400027s/7619057.jpg|10090210] but I could only see it (the fact that they are capable of coherent thought) as a lazy attempt to make the zombie protagonist be eligible as a romantic interest. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the smart zombies of this book didn't bother me one bit! Of course this wasn't a random occurrence. It happened thanks to the fairly plausible bits of explanation that exist throughout the novel (as Angel slowly realizes what she has become) tied in with the more thorough one of what the zombie "virus" really is, which is explained in the 2nd book [b:Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues|12766833|Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues (White Trash Zombie, #2)|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328080041s/12766833.jpg|17910832]. This doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of hints in this one, there are. However, in the 2nd book we also get to have a medical explanation. It doesn't delve too deep in the subject like [a:Mira Grant|3153776|Mira Grant|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1282493757p2/3153776.jpg]'s Newsflesh Trilogy does, but it's satisfying and looks, at least to me, well though out.

In conclusion: I liked this one. It was fun, exciting, had intelligent parts realistic information and even an honest attempt in character development. It was much more than I expected when I first picked it up. I can't wait for the 3rd book to come out.

PS.The audiobook has the most redneck sounding narrator EVER and it's FUN!


( )

Loved it! Not literature by a long shot but was humorous, fun, and enjoyable. Glad I read it! ( )

My Life as a White Trash Zombie
White Trash Zombie, Book 1

I Picked Up This Book Because: #Scarathlon read

Media Type: Audiobook
Source: Audible
Dates Read: 10/25/2022 - 10/29/2022
Stars: 4
Narrator(s): Allison McLemore

The Characters:

Angel Crawford:
:
There are a lot of supporting characters but I cannot remember their names and I’m too lazy to investigate. Dad, “boyfriend”, dealer, sheriff, coworker, I’m sure I’m forgetting someone

The Story:

I am hooked. This book reads like a movie or TV show but maybe that’s just my imagination running away from me. It was quirky, mysterious, irreverent and funny. It was also just a little bit gross, with the decay and brain eating at all. ( )

A case study in excellent book titles. The minute I saw this one, I had to read the description...which turned out to sound pretty fun to both me and Areg. So we downloaded it and read it together and it was, indeed, great fun.

Not to say there aren't some heavy bits. "White trash" is in the title, but it's not treated as a joke--Angel and her father both have poverty, addictions, and domestic trauma to deal with, and she's also coping with emotional and physical abuse, and a criminal record that limits her options for escape dramatically. Still, Angel and her dad push back against the label, and it definitely is damaging to Angel's self-image, which makes me feel a bit guilty for seeing it in juxtaposition to "zombie" and immediately thinking, "fun". I won't say that no one in this book turns out to be trash, because Angel's boyfriend really has no redeeming qualities, but by the end, it's hard to imagine our narrator saying the title out loud with anything but the deadpan humor that I read into it, and which made it so enticing.

Anyway, plot:

Angel's in her early 20s (I think) and a high school dropout who's done time in prison thanks to the people she associates with, works a series of minimum-wage jobs, and she takes non-prescribed prescription drugs to cope when she can't avoid being in the same house as her alcoholic, abusive father. So no one's really surprised when she wakes up in the hospital after a suspected overdose with no memory of the hours leading up to it. No, the surprising part is that she's there after being found naked by the highway not too far from where a headless corpse was discovered.

But angel has a mysterious benefactor, someone who's sent her clothes, a six-pack of special smoothies to help her recover, and a job as a morgue driver (along with a vaguely threatening note to tell her parole officer if she can't keep it). Keeping the job turns out not to be a problem. The morgue's staff's initial confusion at how she, of all people, got the job is quickly replaced with collegial respect as she works hard and proves particularly unsqueamish, even at the sight of more decapitated corpses and her first autopsy. What they don't know is that Angel's found one particular aspect of the autopsy--and the organ it reveals--to be not only fascinating but, well, delicious.

Angel's figuring out the whole zombie thing on her own, but it's the people in her circle who push this book from fun-and-forget-it fluff to a little something more. Her alcoholic father's had his own rough past with his former wife and lost job, and Rowland handles this well--never excusing his terrible treatment of Angel while still allowing him to be human. Angel's complicated feelings about him, and about her on-again-off-again boyfriend (who, yeah, is a bit more a character type), save her from the single-moment-changed-everything trope and keep her nuanced and interesting. Meanwhile, her coworkers at the morgue might be unrealistically supportive, but dang it, Areg and I liked that. There's enough crap in Angel's life without hostile coworkers--why not let her have some who respect her hard work, ask her along to meals, and encourage her to break out of her bad situation without acting all holier-than-thou? It's the kind of fantasy we both wanted.

And I guess that's what I mean when I say that this book was fun. Despite the things Angel deals with, there's an optimism that we both found refreshing in light of our usual media intake, where even the hopeful endings are complicated. It's possible for life to be complicated and hopeful. ( )