Zombies Don't Cry by Rusty Fischer

About the book

Zombies Don’t Cry is the first book in the Living Dead Love Story series by Rusty Fischer. The book was released on 1^st October by Electric Monkey and it is 337 pages long.

Synopsis (Taken from Goodreads.com)

Maddy Swift is just an ordinary girl, until the fateful night when she is struck by lightning and wakes up face down in a puddle. Then it's goodbye to all things Normal – such as breathing and having a heartbeat – and hello to yellow vision and a whole new Afterlife.

Turns out there’s a lot more to being a zombie than shuffling and groaning, but surviving school as one of the living dead requires a totally different set of skills. And things don’t get any easier when Maddy realises that she’s not the reanimated student at Barracuda Bay High . . .

What I thought

I had wanted to read this book for so long, since the author did a guest post on my old blog a long time ago. I love zombie books and this one sounded really different. At the time though, this wasn’t being published in the UK so I’ve had a really long wait for this one.

Zombies Don’t Cry is told from main character Maddy’s point of view, beginning with a short chapter which is set after the events which happen in the rest of the book. Maddie is your average teenage girl trying to get through high school. She doesn’t have many friends and just goes through one day at a time. Her personality and character come through well and her voice is a strong one… one that I liked very much. She’s quite ok not having many friends but she relies on best friend Hazel a fair bit.

Something strange is going on at Maddy’s school and a few girls have mysteriously died. Considering what a small town they live in, it makes people think that something very strange is going on. Also, all of the girls are in one of the same classes at school… the very same class that Maddy and Hazel are in. It doesn’t take long for Maddy to become a zombie and although the other girls did not turn out the same way, she joins them in being dead.

I really liked the way in which Maddy became a zombie. It was original and different and something that I had never read about before. There are apparently two different ways to become a zombie and one way makes you a normal zombie (well, normal according to the author) and then the other way makes you a bad zombie. The bad zombies in this book were very predictable from early on and I wish there had been some more mystery surrounding this aspect. I loved the whole way that Maddy realised what she was and what she had to do to survive. All in all, the zombie aspect of this book was very inventive.

Zombies Don’t Cry has quite a lot of action between the good and bad zombies and this was something that I really enjoyed about this book. Not only was there some new ideas about zombies but there was also a great rivalry going on. The actual ins and outs of being a zombie take up a fair amount of the plot so the action and planning of said action broke this up a little bit. I also liked how there was a small amount of romance in the book. The romance didn’t overpower the plot nor was everything reliant on the love interests involved which was a nice touch.

Although I did like this book, I found myself getting annoyed with a couple of characters at numerous points in the book and I wish the characters had been more likeable. Regardless of this, I enjoyed reading Zombies Don’t Cry and will be looking forward to a sequel.