Book Review: Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel

Okay so I hate zombies. I mean they give me the every loving creeps. I have nightmares about them when  I don't even talk about them. If you talk about zombies around me I have a nightmare. I long ago accepted that I am an epic pansy and my great Achilles heel is zombies.

So, several people are going to crucify me when I say I liked this book. I mean it lead me on in the wrong direction with the book flap but I think I just didn't read things correctly. I was expecting Steam punk Victorian romance, and what I got was post apocalyptic steam punk victorian. Yeah I know. My brain also was really confused by that idea as well. But Habel did get it right, if religious conservatives were the only ones to survive the apocalypse then we would end up with Victorian era part two.

I enjoyed the main characters of this book rather a lot. Granted there were a lot of them because every chapter moved around to a different point of view. And for some reason it took me till about chapter fifteen to realize that the character's name was with the chapter number and told you who was talking.  I liked the zombies the best really but almost all of the characters that were teens made me laugh at some point.

My favorite part perhaps is when Nora has locked her self in a room and Bram the zombie heart throb trying to get her to come out. I don't know if you know anything about a folk singer Jonathan Coultan but he has a rather funny song called Re: Your Brains that this scene simply invoked.

Besides that the one thing that did rub me the wrong was what I like to call "stockholm syndrom love." This happens in a good deal of books where for some reason the girl is being held against her will for a decent part of the book. And this book totally did that. Granted eventual Nora starts helping Z Base but still I am always annoyed when this is a thing.

Is the only way to fall in love in a short period of time involve being held against your will? I really want to know because I swear I could find an instance where that happened and it did not involve lying about the situations at hand.

The only other thing that me a bit crazy was the end. I mean I was under the impression that they found a vaccine. But then oh noes, some of the zombies did infect people that had the vaccines so bad things are going to happen? Like they hadn't already. I was really confused by that part.