You Are So Undead to Me ~ Stacey Jay review

You Are So Undead to Me
Razorbill*
January 22, 2009
272 Pages
Paperback
Amazon



Megan Berry is a zombie settler, a 'job' passed down to her from her mother. It's her 'job,' when a zombie shows up on her doorstep, to find out what they left unsettled when they died and send them back to their grave to....rest in peace.

Except all Megan wants to do is go to the Homecoming dance which is almost impossible when dirty, rotting zombies randomly show up in front of you--and you're not supposed to let anyone in on your little secret! Could things get any worse?

Well, of course they could. Now someone's started using black magic to raise reanimated corpses that are out for blood and if Megan wants to have any hope of attending Homecoming, she's going to have to solve the mystery.

Because my library's crazy and won't get Zombie Queen of Newberry High this might be the first zombie book I've read (I have others on my TBR list, be assured) and it was a lot of fun. The zombies weren't crazy scary or gross (think more that movie with the dad from Medium in the mall vs 28 Days Later) but they weren't fluffy bunnies either.

The plot of the Homecoming dance being what was at stake (which at first made me agree with some of the other characters in thinking it was insane) fit perfectly with the darkness of the rotting corpses coming after the main character. Fluff meets gore or what have you.

And speaking of the fluffy (which wasn't really) and the plot, things were developed nicely. As Megan tried to figure things out, so did the reader. I enjoyed that the book didn't switch between a lot of perspectives as some do so you didn't have tons of information Megan didn't-that really made reading along more enjoyable.

I did read something that said this was like Joss Whedon or Buffy meets something and I didn't quite see that in the actual writing or humor (though there was some and I appreciated that). I could however see it with some of the characters and the storyline: Monica, Megan and Jess were like Cordelia, Buffy & Willow at times-though sometimes they switched around-and the whole idea of a character saving everyone from some supernatural creature but keeping it secret was similar.

Ethan-and maybe the teen male characters together-were probably the letdown of the book for me. They weren't annoying or stupid but they weren't exactly anything else special either. They were okay characters but they weren't fabulous. I liked the female characters a good bit more. Hopefully in the next book in this series I will like all of the characters equally (and a lot).

8/10


*this is the second Razorbill book I've seen where the pages are the slightest bit wider than the cover...What's up with that?