My Life as a White Trash Zombie

I'm thinking more of a 3.5 kind of rating. Angel, a high school drop out, addictive to pills, and lives with her drunk father, wakes up in the hospital thinking she has been in a serious accident but the medical staff tells her she was brought in from an apparent overdose. Fussy memories things only get stranger when she is released with a note and “bottled shakes”. Set up with a job she now must drive around dead bodies and assisting in autopsies. Things that use to disgust Angel out, like the site of blood, don't anymore. In fact they make her mouth water. So as Angel tries to come to terms with her undead life while still dealing with her dead beat dad and friends and an increased number of decapitated bodies keep turning up.
I liked Angel's voice. She was funny in a WTF is going on but hey still going to ride this rollercoaster sort of way. At times the corny was a bit too much, and I was a little shocked about how well she dealt with certain situation but it wasn't enough to pull me out of the story. Angel's interaction with other characters came across as authentic relationships. The author has a way of taking a gory topic and making it humorous and amusing.
The idea and concept of the book was great but somewhere the story line or pacing seemed to slow down that made the book drag. The ending was great. Made up for the sluggish parts and rapped up the mystery unfolding in the book.

This book was just okay. The cover art is literally the best part. Seriously, 5 stars to the artist. I do not recommend the audiobook at all - the sad attempt at an Asian accent is horrendous.

The mystery is extremely weak, the entire plot was predictable, the confrontation with the murderer is laughable (the dialogue made me roll my eyes so hard), and the end romance was so cliché I can't believe more people don't find it lazy. The entire end of the book felt lazy to me. It wrapped everything up in a nice little package within maybe, I don't know, 5 pages or so. The pacing of it was just way off.

It's basically Sookie Stackhouse with zombies, but with fewer distinct characters and a less intelligent main character. Seriously, down to the best friend of someone the main character cares about being the bad guy.

I loved how a secondary female character talked to Angel about rape, both making sure Angel didn't blame herself and talking about how there are different ways to be violated. I thought it was extremely well done and made me feel all sorts of emotional.

If you like chick lit or the Sookie Stackhouse series, you'll probably like this enough. I didn't hate it by any means. It's just okay which is what the Goodreads rating says 2 stars is supposed to mean, so that's what I'm going with. Don't @ me.

Shit, sometimes I have these horrible phases when I can't finish a single book and I hate all of them, but now this is my second surprising find in a row (well, not really, but lets forget about the dud in between). HOW? Not complaining, just... ya know. Cool. I will be honest, I picked it up based on the cover, because it looked awesome. Generally I don't like books with human faces on them, if there is another variant that's not hella ugly I prefer that, but in this case I just really liked the artwork. (Shoot me now or I'll talk about art until I run out of characters, I guess loving books AND visual arts does that.)

Angel sucks at life. She is... white trash, as it says on the tin, but pretty much that's her life. She never finished school, does drugs and drinks, her dad is no good and her boyfriend doesn't give a fuck about anything in life. Neither did she, until recently. She was found unconscious and naked by a road, otherwise pretty much fine. Overdose? Sure. Then she starts getting mysterious letter about how she is expected to go to the coroner's office to start a job or else she will be sent to prison and die there very fast, so she does it. During her new job she notices some.... interesting new ravings, though. Meanwhile decapitated corpses start showing up.

I've noticed something. Everyone tries to be incredibly socially sensitive nowadays, things get banned, people get harassed online and in real life for using the not acceptable word (that changes every two weeks), media gets picked apart viciously for someone wearing the wrong thing. But lower class white people, the “white trash” somehow always get treated with zero sympathy and zero humanity. That's why this was interesting from the get go; Angel's flaws are obvious from the get go. She is not perfect by any means. But she is also a person who is not there because she and her people are basically just one of the few types who you can joke about and hate on without being considered some kind of a bigot. She had her perfectly justifiable feelings and hurts. She's also funny and an enjoyable character, which is not a bad thing for a book that is in first person.

The zombie concept was good too. They are not shambling, brainless (hurr hurr) creatures who pursue you slowly and moan. Basically they can be fine and function normally... if they get the appropriate fuel with the appropriate frequency. Now that was the bare minimum to make them acceptable and readable as characters, I suppose. To make them something other than an enemy or a context for the human heroes to handle we just have to make them somewhat intelligent.
Having them congregate around places that have a lot of dead bodies is funny and logical, though. I also really like the irony of people who handle dead bodies interacting with zombies, it's just really funny. Even in dark scenes, when they discuss the deaths it's interesting, because one part of the conversation is technically also a dead person. (Never had this much fun with that since the living dead attacked the pathologist Waldo Butters in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I would love that bugger meeting Angel, they would bounce off of each other perfectly.)

The mystery in the book wasn't spectacular. I guess we didn't know enough of the characters to make it a truly interesting and hard to solve case? I don't know. I honestly mostly just enjoyed Angel doing her thing. Not like the crime aspect wasn't fun and enjoyable, but as I said, we don't know who does what and why. Well.
I'm pretty sure based on the blurbs that some bigger story will develop eventually, so there is that. Hopefully Angel won't be turned into a Mary Sue who is the centre of a lovefest by everyone around her with a gigantic horde of adoring men a'la October Daye (eugh), so if we can avoid that I think this can become a surprisingly solid urban fantasy type of a deal.

I don't know shit about the author. I don't read those kind of romantic or erotic paranormal romances and her other series seems to be like that, so not my thing, but I will definitely read more of this series. The bright pink cover could be a bit off-putting or maybe the title, I don't know, but it's genuinely pretty damn fun.

Good night and don't forget your lunch!

???Go. Run,??? I snarled. ???I don???t ever want to see you again. And if you kill any more zombies, I???ll hunt you down and eat you. Then I???ll kill you.??? Heh. I cracked myself up sometimes.

This was a cute, fun, easy read. It resembled iZombie, but had its own vibe. I'd definitely read the next book in the series at some point when I was looking for something not too serious.

All the covers are amazing!

Angel is what you would probably call white trash. She dropped out of school, lives in a dump with her drunk dad, can't hold a job, and is into all kinds of drugs. One night, she goes out partying as usual, and her whole life changes. She gets into a terrible car accident, she's a bloody mess, then wakes up in the hospital with not a scratch. Did she hallucinate the whole thing? Read the book and find out!! I really enjoyed this book. I liked the characters. Angel, Marcus, and even Nick the prick. I look forward to the next book.

3.5 ⭐️s

I don’t normally do .5 ratings, but this one is definitely better than a 3 but not quite a 4. I loved the unique lore and world building of this novel where zombies are sentient. Angel is a fun protagonist and I was absolutely rooting for her the whole way. The end felt rushed and I had figured out the “mysteries” pretty early on in the book. But I couldn’t put it down and will get to the 2nd in the series sometime soon.