Dearly, Departed—Lia Habel

I imagined walking with a young man in the dark, and bit into my sandwich viciously. All of the boys I knew were fast turning into unimpressive adults. They had let me play soldier with them when I was a girl, but now expected that I would smile and nod brainlessly at whatever they said. Amazing, how quickly they had fallen in step with society's rules. (42)

Part of Vaginal Fantasy Rewind

Moving right along on the VF Rewind train! Dearly, Departed was during a month that was focused on zombies. (The main was My Life as a White Trash Zombie, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Further thoughts on that one coming soon.)

Set in a dystopian future. As the book jacket relates, "The year is 2195. The place is New Victoria—a high-tech nation modeled on the manners, mores, and fashions of an antique era." Which is a great, pithy description of a book. Nora Dearly is living a pretty normal life in New Victoria, although she has been having a bit of a difficult time since her father died a year ago. Now she lives with her aunt. After having finished her school year, she's returned to her aunt's house, and is planning a normal summer. Until she's almost kidnapped and/or killed by a horde of zombies. But she doesn't know they're zombies, because she's never seen them before. Nora is saved by a different set of zombies, ones that are as close to sane and intact and human as zombies can get. (Unfortunately for New Victoria, the crazy, virus-spreading zombies are left behind and start spreading the zombie plague.) The good zombies take Nora away to their military base, where she learns that her father is still alive...sort of. Although he did die last year, he died with the zombie virus running through his veins, which means that he's still ambulatory. As a scientist, he's the one who has been helping to maintain the good zombies' states, and is actively searching for what he believes may be a cure. But now, it's getting harder and harder to keep their zombie existence a secret, especially with the increase of non-maintained zombies, so they will have to fight for their right to remain undead.

This book held such promise. I really like the steampunky, revival of old ideals concept. You don't often see a setting like that in books set in the future. But as the story went on, it kind of lost it's steam (no pun intended). I found Nora charming and Bram lovely, the secondary characters were engaging and interesting for the most part. I liked Pamela and Chaz especially as kick ass ladies. I did find the constant change of point of view a bit off putting, but I got used to it eventually. I agree with Felicia and Bonnie though, that I didn't care much about some of the points of view.

But ultimately, this one didn't stick in my head much after I finished reading it. It could have been amazing, but in my mind, it ended up being just okay.

One more down!

Felicia said during the Hangout that this is one of the only books ever that she's lemmed (which means that she didn't finish it).