Reading Under the Willow Tree

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The Weepers: The other life is hard to review I have so much to say about it equal good and bad things. I did enjoy it and feel like it does have a place in this YA Dystopian trend. It is not the first zombie/monster book to come out in YA Dystopian and it will not be the last but it holds up well against the rest and truly does have flashes of brilliance in it. The problem is that there are irritations that take away from those flashes which is a real shame. In order to make this review easier for me to write and easier for you to read I am going to split it up into a like section and a did not like section.

Things I liked

•It was a very quick and easy read. The story was fast paced and the text wasn’t bogged down with unnecessary detail and descriptions.
•I am not a zombie purist but I would say beyond a doubt that the creatures in this book are not zombies at all (they are smart, they stockpile food, they can run etc) they are something else entirely. The creatures in this are infected with a strain of Rabies and it mutates them from human into…beast. These creatures are horrible, the detail in the descriptions of them are precise and gruesome. They have been fleshed out by the author and feel very, very real. They are just horrible and because of all that they are really, really amazing. There were even times where I felt pity for these creatures. They are the best thing about this book.
•I think the whole concept is also very relevant. A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary on Discovery about this very subject, the chances of Rabies mutating and starting a ‘zombie’ plague.
•The history is explained. I cannot stress how important this is to me. I have read so many books of this genre and 99% of them do not explain how the world is post-apocalyptic. It was just nice to have some form of explanation.
•There are times (and unfortunately they are few) where this book is brilliantly uncomfortable. It made me fidget in my seat and want to look away from the pages. In places Winnacker’s world is frighteningly realistic.
•There were also moments where this book was really exhilarating. Again these scenes did not happen often but when they did the pages came alive for me.
• The romance was understated and cute. It could have been a little more but I am glad that it wasn’t. It was sweet instead of passionate which made a nice change.
•There were some nice twists in the plot which kept me on my toes.
•I liked the ending. It closed this book but left it open for continuation. There was no big cliff-hanger, just the suggestion that there could be more.

What I disliked

•There were a couple of things that stood out as being extremely unrealistic but they didn’t detract from the story as a whole.
• The Characters lacked history, I knew a little about Sherry because of the flash-backs but not much about anyone else. It is like there life started with the plague and anything that happened before then (for most of the characters) is irrelevant. I just wanted a little more.
•There are these flashbacks of Sherry’s life at the end of each chapter. They are little snippets of her life before everything happened. They are short and sweet but I found they pulled me out of the world the story was set in. I wasn’t exactly sure what the point of them was. I thought her history could have been explained better in the present with conversation or thoughts then through flash backs.
•There is a lot of this ‘1’404 days since this, 576 days since I ate this’ when I say a lot, I mean A LOT. It was ok in the beginning, it even helped to set the tone but as the book continued it became too much and began to irritate me.
•Sometimes the chapters seemed to end very abruptly. Sherry would ask someone a question, the chapter would end, and the next chapter would start with the person answering the question. I found it a little distracting.
•I found all the characters to be a little lacking. They all seemed a bit blank; they didn’t have much personality which was such a shame because so much else of this book was done so well.

I really did enjoy this book despite having some problems with it. I hope that a lot of things I found missing in the first book will find their way into the second (a book that I will read). I would recommend it to fans of the genre. It is pacey, a little scary and easy to read. The Weepers: The Other Life is out May 15th 2012.

(I recieved a free copy of this book from the publisher for review.)