This book was quite a conundrum for me to read. There were some major good points and some major bad points. Ultimately, I can’t say that I liked the book because it felt like a really big missed opportunity that failed to deliver on much of what it promised.

This book is told in two points of view and multiple timelines. Each chapter is titled with the narrator and the years it covers to make it easier to follow along, until the last chapter which was very confusing. It covers a span from the 70s to the 90s and discusses a lot of serious topics. It talks about the AIDS crisis in the gay community. It covers school shootings. It covers the new freak show of our era, trash TV. It covers public reaction to all of the above. It was a very ambitious novel and didn’t quite pull it off.

**Mild Spoilers Alert**

Our first narrator is Semi, which I thought was an innuendo until the author piped in that it’s pronounced like semi-truck and then I wasn’t really sure what it was supposed to be because I have always heard that pronounced with a hard I sound. But I’m getting off point. Semi was a great narrator. He was the former lover of Mattie M, back when he was a local politician and lawyer with his eyes on the mayorship of New York. I loved hearing about his love story with Mattie and I loved hearing about his perspective on the AIDS crisis. My only complaint is that I didn’t actually learn anything about Semi as a person. He told his story through the stories of his friends, So while I enjoyed his narration, I didn’t feel like I got to know him at all since he was hiding his truth behind his friends.

Cel is the narrator for much of the portion of the book that covers the school shooting and ensuing chaos, She is the publicist for the Mattie M Show. To be quite frank, I have no idea what she was doing in this novel. She didn’t have a single ounce of personality and rarely spoke more than a fragment of a sentence at a time. Her back story was confusing so I couldn’t even get emotionally involved in that aspect of her story. I also have no idea how or why the show hired her as a publicist. She doesn’t like the job and she doesn’t even seem to know how to do the job. Most of her story is making snarky one liners at other staff of the show, complaining about her job to her friends, and watching TV in bars. She doesn’t do anything. Then at the end of the book she decides to quit her job and become a stand up comedienne? Where the fuck did that come from? She went to a comedy club one time with a reporter and implied she had been there before, but she is not funny and we are given no indication that she ever wanted to do anything like that.

The first 125 pages of the book are largely useless. If I was the editor, I’d have scrapped them entirely. It is mostly Semi talking about his friends and Cel trying to avoid doing work. We only get into the meat of what the novel is supposed to be about about at page 130 and then it started to get awesome. After that point, I was completely invested and thought the novel was making some very profound points.

What I got from the novel is that television and news events are the new blood sport of our day. Whether we’re watching a trashy reality TV show, watching a play about some emotionally charged event, or watching news coverage on a tragedy. We are not actually watching the thing. We are not actually interested in the thing itself. It doesn’t matter how it begins. It doesn’t matter how it ends. The truth doesn’t matter either. The point is that we’re watching it. As the book says toward the end, we’re an audience, watching an audience, watching an audience. I was a little stunned at how profound I found this book based on how badly it began.

Then we got to the ending and it disappointed me again. In the end, the author decides to give us the truth. Give us the truth about what’s in the letters. Give us the truth of what the play was about. Give us the truth about Mattie M and Semi. I was so disappointed that I wanted to stop reading. We just spent approximately 200 pages telling the reader that the truth of these things was irrelevant. I was just another audience, watching an audience, watching an audience. So then if these things don’t matter, why are you insisting on telling me?

Maybe, in the end, I read too much into the book. Maybe the author didn’t actually intend to make any profound and philosophical points. Maybe she didn’t think she could resist giving me the final pieces of the puzzle. But, regardless, it damaged the book for me.

I’m generally not a fan of zombie lit, nor do I generally prefer my monsters to be anything other than horrifying, but when I read the first book of this series for Halloween Bingo last year, I fell in love. The titular zombie, Angel, is the perfect heroine: sassy and feisty and fiercely independent, but also vulnerable and even tenderly caring at times. In this third book of the series, she is still learning to navigate her new place in the world as both newbie zombie in a hidden zombie society and as a newly semi-respectable, drug-free, contributing member of society with “the Normals”. She’s trying to figure out how to have a healthy, functioning romantic relationship. In one really sweet and sad moment, she is delighted and amazed that she actually has real friends who would show up at her party. But there is plenty of action with a budding war between the zombie mobsters and a defense contractor trying to develop the means to control and weaponize zombies.

Audiobook, via Audible. Alison McLemore’s narration is still absolutely perfect.

I read this book for the Booklikes Halloween Bingo 2019, for the square Dead Lands: Elements of the undead - zombies, wights, vampires and other revenants. This story is chock-full of zombies, of course!

Prior Updates:

Sep29 2%

I desperately needed something light and funny, and this was perfect. This second book in the series was almost as much fun as the first, as Angel settles in to her new life and begins to understand something about zombie pathophysiology and even zombie society, such as it is. Of course there is mystery and danger and action, because that's the kind of book it is, but we also get to see a touching side of Angel's relationship with her father, and witness Angel struggle to redefine herself as a person of worth and sense, deserving to be treated (by herself and others) with common dignity.

Audiobook, via Audible. Allison McLemore's performance elevates a very good book into a five star read for me. 

Review of the first book, "My Life as a White Trash Zombie".

Date Published: October 18, 2018

Format: Audiobook

Source: RB Digitial

Read: December 27-28, 2018

Winter COYER's Read All the Books Read-a-thon

Blurb:

Wouldn't it be great if life came with an instruction manual? Of course, but like access to Michael B. Jordan's house, none of us are getting any. Thankfully, Phoebe Robinson is ready to share everything she's experienced in hopes that if you can laugh at her topsy-turvy life, you can laugh at your own.

Written in her trademark unfiltered and singularly witty style, Robinson's latest essay collection is a call to arms. She tackles a wide range of topics, such as giving feminism a tough love talk in hopes it can become more intersectional; telling society's beauty standards to kick rocks; and demanding that toxic masculinity close its mouth and legs (enough with the manspreading already!), and get out of the way so true progress can happen.

Robinson also gets personal, exploring debt she has hidden from her parents, how dating is mainly a warmed-over bowl of hot mess, and maybe most importantly, meeting Bono not once, but twice. She's struggled with being a woman with a political mind and a woman with an ever-changing jean size. She knows about trash not only because she sees it every day, but also because she's seen about one hundred thousand hours of reality TV and zero hours of Schindler's List.

Everything's Trash, But It's Okay is a candid perspective for a generation that has had the rug pulled out from under it too many times to count, as well as an intimate conversation with a new best friend.

Review:

Even better than the first book. I think to really get Robinson's tone, the reader should opt for the audiobook, especially for the part with her boyfriend (codename: "British Bake Off"). She is funnier in this one and also much more honest. I think the best parts of the book is when she recounts the times she met Bono of U2 and how she got into a ton of debt and how she worked herself out of that debt. Still there are a lot of tangents, but they are not as interfering in the audiobook as it was reading her first book. Overall, I am so glad a talent like Robinson is getting attention for both her writing and her comedy. She is a seriously funny and fresh voice.

The second book in the white trash zombie series sees Angel being falsely implicated in the theft of an unusual body from the morgue. With her job on the line she investigates who could be behind the theft and comes across a disturbing organisation that ties in with the zombie mafia.

This was almost as good as the first book, there's not much difference in my rating for 1 & 2 just a feeling that I liked the first book slightly more. That being said this was all out fun, a little slow to start off with but there's a lot going on and it was a fast read once I got into it.

The biggest reason I am loving this series is Angel, she's such a great character. She undergoes quite a bit of character growth in this second book, starting to better and believe in herself more and it was heartening to see her move forward in her relationships with others, especially her father. She is a very relatable and overall likeable character, in no way perfect and better for it. 

A fun read that has me itching to get the next one started. Highly recommended.