Lisa Reviews: Brian James' - "Zombie Blondes"

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! ZOMBIES!!!

Zombie Blondes by Brian James was a book I stumbled upon during a Half Price Books Warehouse Sale last summer, and for only a dollar, I had no choice but to pick it up. I loved the cover, and I was going through a zombie craze at the time!

For only a dollar, I don’t regret anything…

With her dad running away from his past (ratting out fellow cops, for doing the wrong thing) and the collect calls, Hannah is used to coming home with her dad in the car and finding all her stuffed packed up.

Hannah Sanders has spent the last few years of her life moving around, and being the new girl in many different schools. While the schools looked different and had different names, they were practically all the same; with the same type of cliques and the same type of people. Hannah has never been part of the popular crowd, but has always wanted to be accepted for who she was.

Her dad is doing the best he can, and Hannah knows that. So while she does get frustrated with him, she knows that they only have each other, and that they need to stick together. But when the two of them move to a small town in Vermont, called Maplecrest, Hannah feels uneasy.

Driving through the town, she realizes that it’s practically empty and that almost every house has a “For Sale” sign posted in the front yard. Something here just doesn’t seem right, and Hannah knows it in her gut. But her hopes do get a bit higher that the school she’ll be going to might be small and that there would be no issue of cliques.

But Hannah was wrong; this school is just like any other one she attended, if not worse.

As usual the popular kids are football players and cheerleaders… who all strangely look similar. On her first day of school, Hannah doesn’t make any friends, but this weird guy named Lukas, does introduce himself. While at first he seemed to a normal “weird” guy, Lukas is trying to convince Hannah that the school and Maplecrest are full of zombies.

Ignoring his crazy accusations, Hannah jumps on the first opportunity to becoming part of the popular group; cheer tryouts. After making it on the squad, Hannah realizes a few odd things here and there about both the cheerleaders and the football players, causing her to think about what Lukas said. But instead of confronting what’s going on, she decided to just push aside the thought.

Soon Hannah comes to the conclusion that maybe Lukas isn’t as weird as she thought he was, and maybe it was a HUGE mistake not to listen to his advice.

Zombie Blondes stood out to me for two reasons, it was only a dollar, and it had zombies in the title… I love zombies… don’t judge!

But when reading the synopsis, I was worried that this was going to be another book about a teenage girl willing to do anything to become popular. I don’t go for those books, I find the main character to usually be shallow, and have absolutely no self acceptance. But luckily Brian James veered away from that in this book. Hannah is hoping for acceptance and friendship instead of popularity. Hannah has never truly belonged anywhere, and she is searching for that belonging in Zombie Blondes.

With being part of a military family, I could easy compare to Hannah, and the constant moving. It’s hard to make new friends and go to new schools all the time, so I completely understood why Hannah wanted to be accepted so badly.

The only question that arose in me while reading this book, was about Lukas. He knew what the zombies, he knew about what they were doing, and he was even warning others about them. Why didn’t the zombies just get rid of him? Like they did everybody else, why keep him around?

Overall I really enjoyed it! I had high hopes that it was going to be ALL about zombies, but it wasn’t. I guess I was a little disappointed by that, but that was more my own fault, because I didn’t really look into what the story was about.

If you’re looking for a zombie twist on a high school teenage girl story, this would be the book for you.