Book I Gave Up On-- Alice In Zombieland

Alice In Zombieland by Gena Showalter

Published by Harlequin Teen

Genre: YA paranormal

$18.99 (US hardback)

404 pages

 

What it's about:

 

She won’t rest until she’s sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever.

Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that’s all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone.

Her father was right. The monsters are real….

To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn’t careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies….


I wish I could go back and do a thousand things differently.
I'd tell my sister no.
I'd never beg my mother to talk to my dad.
I'd zip my lips and swallow those hateful words.
Or, barring all of that, I'd hug my sister, my mom and my dad one last time.
I'd tell them I love them.
I wish... Yeah, I wish.

Why I Gave Up:

So here's why; it was ridiculous. I have this problem, every time I see anything Alice In Wonderland related, be it movie, book, ect. I must have it. Because of this problem, I've read a lot of crap and seen a lot of horrible movies. It's hard to recreate the wacky world of Wonderland and very few can pull it off. Gena Showalter can not pull it off.

So in the beginning of AIZ, you find out that Alice's whole family was killed by the "monsters." You also find out that her dad is a raving lunatic that doesn't allow the family outside at all after dark. He patrols the house with a gun all night long and during the day he sits around drinking and getting drunk. He says there are man eating monsters that come out of the graveyards every night and they eat people. Alice also notes how her dad has tried going to shrinks, taking meds, all of that good stuff to get over his paranoia and it just got worse. Then on Alice's 16th birthday, she convinces her parents to go out at night. In the end, the dad gets so paranoid while being the passenger in the car while driving past the cemetery, he freaks out and ends up killing everyone but Alice.

The face I made the whole time I was reading

Okay, so let me get this straight, zombies come out of their graves every night, go on a rampage, and then tuck themselves back in their coffins at night, cleaning everything up in the process, and NO ONE NOTICES??? What kind of crap is that? How is it that the half eaten corpses are not in the news every day? How is it that a crazy drunk is the only one that has taken notice of this living dead phenomena?
I do not care if this is explained later on in the story (I guess they are like ghost zombies from what I've heard from other reviews), I'm still not buying it at all. Even if there are zombies out there and Alice becomes some kind of zombie hunter, she can't really have a "you killed my father, prepare to die" rage because zombies didn't kill her family, her dad did. This whole thing just makes me sad. A whole family killed because they didn't really do anything to help her father.

To add on top of this, if you think that Alice In Zombieland has ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ALICE IN WONDERLAND, you are wrong wrong wrong. You think that it would, but it really truly doesn't. Alice does not go to some different land and kill the evil creatures like the title and cover would suggest. So if you are reading it because of the AIW connection, run, run away and never return. It is a blatant ripoff to get people to read the book that they otherwise might not have picked up.