Review of Lia Habel's Dearly, Departed

Title: Dearly, Departed

Author: Lia Habel

Publisher: Del Rey

Format: Hardcover & eBook

Source: NetGalley

Publication Date: October 18, 2011

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Lia Habel’s Dearly, Departed is the first Young Adult novel I’ve reviewed for the blog, and it is OUTSTANDING. I’m so glad I requested this book for review, because it is extremely well-written and will appeal to readers of all ages. I have to warn you that at times the zombies in this novel totally squicked me out, but HELLO, they’re ZOMBIES, so consider yourself warned. But even with the zombie gross out factor, this hardcover YA release is well worth the price, and I’m eagerly awaiting more from this author.

Set in 2195 after a new ice age has forced humans to migrate to Central and South America, the novel takes place in New Victoria. The survivors of the numerous wars and plagues decided that the Victorian Age was the golden period of humanity and have recreated that period’s class structure, dress and mores, while using technology more familiar to readers in the 21st century, such as digital cameras, an “aethernet,” cell phones, and flat screen televisions.  

As the novel begins, 16 year old Nora Dearly and her best friend Pamela Roe are preparing to leave boarding school for the Christmas holidays. As Nora faces a dreary holiday placing insipid calls with her social-climbing aunt, she’s unable to shake off the sadness she feels after her father’s death a year earlier. Little does Nora realize that she’ll soon be facing down horrifying creatures intent on taking her captive.

Fortunately for Nora, 18 year old Captain Bram Griswold rescues her from the zombies, only to reveal to her that he himself is the walking undead. Bram and his company form part of a special army unit created to fight vicious zombies and prevent the spread of the Lazarus virus. Their existence depends upon her not-so-dead father’s creating a vaccine for the virus, but Dr. Dearly is missing. Bram does not plan on falling for a snooty New Victorian Neoaristocrat, but they must work together to find the missing doctor and prevent the spread of the Lazarus virus. But can there be a future for the two of them when Bram is already dead?

Dearly, Departed is narrated in the first person by several characters, although the principal narrators are Nora, Pamela, and Bram. The strength of these voices is only one of the many reasons I enjoyed this novel. First and foremost, the female characters are outstanding. Nora and Pam are constrained by society to seek husbands and thus support their families’ social ambitions, yet they prove their strength of character under extremely adverse conditions, and that strength of character is clearly evident in the narration. Each chapter clearly identifies who is speaking, but I’m not sure that’s necessary, as the characters have strong individual voices.

The zombies themselves make for charming and irrepressible secondary characters you won’t be able to forget. While their bodies won’t recover from injury and will eventually decay, they clearly retain their humanity and deserve to be treated as more than expendable weapons. Bram in particular is charming in his attempts to maintain his humanity, and you’ll easily see why Nora falls for him.

One of the reasons I find this book so refreshing is that it avoids many of the tropes we see repeatedly in Young Adult fiction. There isn’t a love triangle per se, although one of human teenage aristocrats acts as though there were. Also, the parents are not missing in action in this book. Pamela’s parents are very active in her life, even if we don’t approve of how they treat her. They attempt to constrain her actions, but when the family is threatened, they show themselves willing to listen to her. I also like how Nora’s reunion with her father is explored, since he discusses his decisions with her and is capable of admitting when he’s wrong.

I do have a few criticisms of the novel, however. My first is that I’m not really certain why Nora’s aunt appears in the book. At first she acts as Nora’s guardian, but she quickly disappears once Nora is kidnapped, and she’s only mentioned in passing once more. While her actions and relationship to Nora demonstrate what Nora can expect as a woman of her social class, it seems odd that she would play so prominent a role in the beginning, only to disappear so quickly.

My second concern is also minor. We learn through Nora that the survivors of the ice age and numerous civil wars considered the Victorian Age to be man’s Golden Age, but I had a hard time understanding why the original female survivors would allow themselves to return to a period that severely restricts their movement and limits their worth.

Despite my misgivings about the New Victorians, the world building is compelling and the writing exceptional, making this a delightful read for both the young and the not-so-young.

Review of Diana Rowland's My Life as a White Trash Zombie

This book is seriously sick – and I LOVED it!!! I made a trip to Barnes and Noble yesterday and was totally psyched to find this book out a few days early, since it’s not supposed to come out until Tuesday.  I’m a huge fangirl of Diana Rowland’s Kara Gillian books, and My Life as a White Trash Zombie is a great start to a new series. This book rocked! I’ve never been a big fan of zombie fiction, but I love to read paranormal fiction set in the South, so this book seemed right up my alley, and it did not disappoint. The super cool cover by artist Daniel Dos Santos is just icing on the cake.

Angel Crawford is a self-described loser who finds herself in the emergency room after a drug overdose. When she’s released from the hospital, the nurses give her a sack of clothes and a small cooler, with an anonymous note that tells her to drink one bottle of what’s in the cooler every other day and informs her that she’s starting work as a van driver at the coroner’s office first thing in the morning. If she manages to keep the job, she’ll avoid jail time, which she’s eager to do since she’s currently on probation for possession of stolen property. It’s not until she’s at her new job the next day, assisting the pathologist in an autopsy, that she realizes that something is VERY wrong, because the smell of the cadaver’s brains make her stomach growl in hunger. Eventually she learns the truth – she’s a zombie and has to eat brains to survive. When headless corpses start showing up around town and the cops begin looking for a serial killer, Angel starts to wonder if she’s not the only zombie in town.

Diana Rowland’s experience as a cop and a morgue assistant give her a lot of material to draw on for her novels, and the yuck factor with the autopsies is high, which made this pretty appealing to my admittedly sophomoric sense of humor. “Ewww, gross!” was mentioned quite a few times while I was reading, that’s for sure. I love how Ms. Rowland describes the more tedious aspects of crime scene investigation and Angel’s surprise at how unlike crime scene investigation in real life is compared to shows on TV. She manages to make some seriously uncool realities interesting, and that’s because of her characters.

On the face of it, Angel Crawford should be an unappealing heroine. She’s a high school dropout, self-described white trash, a convicted felon, and a habitual drug user. But from the start she’s a character with whom you’ll empathize. The more we learn about her past, the more we realize that she’s had a rough time of it, and her growing pride in her new skills at her job have us rooting for her. She’s only 21, and it turns out that being made into a zombie is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to her. You get the sense that she hasn’t had many second chances up to this point, and you want to cheer for her as she starts to make some really mature decisions and gets her life turned around.

There are two important plot lines in the novel that’ll keep you turning the pages. The first has to do with Angel’s life as a zombie. We learn along with her all that entails while the secondary mystery about a serial killer who decapitates his victims unfolds. The growing number of murders has Angel worried since it could decrease her access to a ready food supply, but she also wonders if there’s a rogue zombie in town attacking people. Ms. Rowland seamlessly ties the two mysteries together and the ending resolves both in a way that I did not see coming.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. The writing was tight without being sparse, the dialogue was funny and snarky, and the heroine was just the right mixture of vulnerability and toughness. The only downside to this book? Having to wait for the next in the series!