LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE: A NOVEL (audiobook) by Sarah Davis-Goff

 

Published in 2019 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by Anne-Marie Gaillard,
Duration: 5 hours, 33 minutes.
Unabridged.

Set in a dystopian future in Ireland, Last Ones Left Alive is the story of Orpen, a teenage girl. The world is overrun by "skrakes".

The reader is never exactly told what skrakes are, but it is useful to just think of them as a sort of zombie. Skrakes hunt humans and when a human is bitten by a skrake, the human gets an infection and becomes a skrake. 

Orpen grew up on an island off of the coast of Ireland. There are three of them - Orpen, her mother and another woman named Maeve, The skrakes never come to the island, but from time to time her mother and Maeve must leave the island to scrounge for supplies and hunt.

The story is told in chapters that alternate between the present and flashbacks to Orpen's childhood. There are hints as to what Maeve and her mother did before they came to the island. It is clear is that they have extraordinary hand-to-hand combat skills, both individually and especially as a team. Orpen is trained in those skills as she gets older and has finally reached the point where she can head to the mainland as well....

This is a debut novel for the author and she did an extraordinary job of telling the story from the point of view of just one character. There is no all-knowing narrator that tells us what happened to unleash the skrakes and there is no change of perspective that lets the reader go "Oh! Now I see." Instead, we get the perspective of this one young lady and it's more than enough to build a compelling story.

The audiobook was read by Anne-Marie Gaillard. Her Irish accent was an amazing change of pace for this audiobook reader. Her tone was perfect, no matter the accent.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:

LAST ONES LEFT ALIVE: A NOVEL (audiobook) by Sarah Davis-Goff.

ZONE ONE: A NOVEL by Colson Whitehead

Originally published in 2011 by Doubleday.

I don't often read zombie novels. I have reviewed 1600+ books and this is only my second one featuring zombies. They're not really my thing, but I figured that if an author who won two Pulitzer Prizes wrote a zombie book, it must be worth reading.

I was wrong.

The premise behind ZONE ONE is quite good, but it is an over-written mess.

Mark Spitz (a nickname) is a man who has gone through his life as a B/B+ type of guy. Never the smartest guy in class, never the first guy picked to play for the schoolyard games, but certainly not close to the last. He kind of floats through life being "good enough."

The reader meets Mark Spitz well into the Zombie Apocalypse. He is working as part of a mopping up crew in New York City. He and his crew are seeking out Zombies that the military may have missed in their sweep through the city. The worst of the Zombie attacks has passed and a provisional government is working out of Buffalo, New York. 

This new government is very concerned with crafting a narrative of the recovery - a narrative of hope and rebuilding with an official theme song and heroes and brand name sponsors and news from all of the other little colonies that it has established on the East Coast.

But, there are rumblings that things aren't going according to the plan...

My take: 

Whitehead has said that he was inspired by his childhood love of Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. King's The Stand is certainly a benchmark to judge all "end of the world" books by, but his lesser-known Cell has the most in common with this book. 

Cell has a focused plot with little character development (a rarity for King). Zone One's plot is constantly interrupted with flashbacks - some fill in important gaps, some seemingly just to fill up some pages. That's not quite fair, but the incessant flashbacks just ruined the momentum of the story. I think it would have been better if he had just cut the book up into its little narrative chunks and placed them in chronological order.

For a reason that is never explained, this new government is obsessed with re-
establishing New York City. As one of the most crowded urban environments in the United States, I would think that NYC would be a horrible place for a fledgling government to spend its limited resources. High urban populations would mean more zombies per city block. Why not just stay in Buffalo and take over Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, areas with low populations and less zombies? I guess it was more of the symbolism over substance pattern that this new government had already exhibited. Yes, re-establishing NYC would be a major feat, but would it be worth the cost? I think it is really a product of Whitehead leading a NYC-centric life, almost like he couldn't imagine that they would abandon New York City and head to West Virginia or Arkansas or South Dakota. 

On a different note, my edition of this book (first edition) was written in a font that I found very hard to read - tiny and very busy. 

I rate this novel 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ZONE ONE: A NOVEL by Colson Whitehead.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

I reluctantly started this one and finished it enthusiastically

Originally published in 2006 by Crown.

A friend from work had World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War on his desk and said I should read it.

Zombies!? No thanks!

I've avoided all of the Twilight books and the other undead/monster books. He pitched it by saying it was fictional (of course!) but modeled after the very real work of Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. For those that don't know, Terkel interviewed hundreds of people about World War II and arranged their interviews into a narrative of sorts that told the history of the war.

Well, that wasn't much of a selling point either because I never really got into Studs Terkel very much, so this was strike two. But, I took it home and started reading.

Max Brooks

The first 20-30 pages are boring but they do set up the rest of the book by introducing the concept of zombies, how they came to be, what they are capable of and what stops them. Once we get to the Battle of Yonkers this book hits its stride and really hums along.

There are recurring characters but the four that struck me the most were the Japanese gardener and the computer geek, the Chinese submarine and the dog handler. The dog handler struck me as the most "human" story of the bunch because of the unabashed affection and bond between dog and handler. I was actually moved to tears about this fictional story about a man and his dachshund/beagle mix - partially because I had one and he described its feisty, independent, loving a good fight personality (yes, that little dog was sure that she was put on this earth to rule ALL dogs), and partially because they survived.

Well, there it is - I went from reluctant reader to nearly crying about what I was reading. That's why I'm giving it 5 stars out of 5.

By the way - so much better than the movie - and so very different! Basically, they only share zombies and a title.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: World War Z.

Reviewed on December 23, 2009.