My Life as a White Trash Zombie

I don’t read zombie books.

Well, not unless they’re original, funny, well written, and make you fall in love with the main character, not because she’s zombie but because she’s doing her best to be a good person who just happens to need to eat brains, in which case, I’m reading “My Life As A White Trash Zombie.”

This book is pretty close to perfect (except for the cover art, which is cool but not remotely related to the character of Angel Crawford in the book) the story is fast-paced enough to keep you turning the pages (or listening in my case), the language is vivid, fun and unconventional and the “voice” of Angel Crawford is authentic and compelling.

I strongly recommend the audiobook version of this novel because show more Allison McLemore’s narration makes good text even better. Her accent, timing and emotional range are a perfect fit for the story. She helped make Angel Crawford real for me.

This is a relatively short book but not a page is wasted. You’ll read it with a smile and perhaps the occasional tear and you’ll be glad you did and then go looking for more.

Fortunately there is more to be had. “Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues” is in my reading queue, mentally tagged as “reward yourself with this one”. show less

This was my first [a:Diana Rowland|852078|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1235174372p2/852078.jpg] book, so I had no expectations whatsoever. I'm not going to describe the plot nor write spoilers.



Before reading the book I LOVED it's cover. In fact I picked it up solely because of it's cool pink zombie cover. I mean look at it! It's pink, with a beautiful woman, piercings, blood, don't-give-a-damn look...what's not to like?
But I must admit it, again because of the cover I didn't expect it to be any good. I was just in the mood for a bad paranormal romance novel as my weekly guilty pleasure that also happened to have a cover I enjoyed looking at. A book that would be fun but badly written. A B-Movie type of book.

Now that show more I finished not only this but also the second book in the series I can say that the cover is definitely they worst part of the book. I wish it was different because it doesn't represent the content and makes it look "cheaper" than it actually is.
Am I making sense?

The novel is written in a first person perspective, which means that we get a lot of "telling" instead of "showing". The protagonist seems very real and Rowland has not tried to do her any favors in order to score points with the readers. She is a white trash girl with a melodramatic story that manages to balance between being moving and cheesy pretty well.

The romance part is barely visible, which is one of the things I loved in this book. I was really afraid that it was going to be like the Parasole Protectorate series (too much fuss about a mystery we don't really care about because we all know it's just a pretense to hide the fact that the main theme is the romantic story). But thankfully it wasn't. The romance was not an end in itself but a natural and logical sequence of the events that took place. It wasn't the main focus of the novel either. The focal storyline was a mystery! Ok it was a weak mystery (the second novel [b:Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues|12766833|Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues (White Trash Zombie, #2)|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328080041s/12766833.jpg|17910832] almost excels in that department) but it was fun!

I read that [a:Diana Rowland|852078|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1235174372p2/852078.jpg] has worked as a morgue assistant, detective, crime scene investigator etc and IT SHOWS! This was one of the most pleasant things in the book. I just began reading [b:Married With Zombies|7716140|Married With Zombies (Living with the Dead, #1)|Jesse Petersen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1265814659s/7716140.jpg|10450081], where the couple says that they'll use zombie movies as a reference material to fight the undead and it made me chuckle because Rowland does the exact opposite. She describes, through the eyes of Angel -her protagonist- how everything is different from the tv-shows and movies, less glamorous and more real. That constant note of realism throughout the novel makes it even more exciting and even rubs off some of it onto the whole...zombie thing.

And now that I finally came to the zombies let me say this: I HATE it when they make zombies smart. I am a huge zombie fan and I want my zombies brainless dammit! I have read stuff that try to have a new take on the zombie thing and utilize smart zombies, like [b:Warm Bodies|7619057|Warm Bodies|Isaac Marion|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1323400027s/7619057.jpg|10090210] but I could only see it (the fact that they are capable of coherent thought) as a lazy attempt to make the zombie protagonist be eligible as a romantic interest. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the smart zombies of this book didn't bother me one bit! Of course this wasn't a random occurrence. It happened thanks to the fairly plausible bits of explanation that exist throughout the novel (as Angel slowly realizes what she has become) tied in with the more thorough one of what the zombie "virus" really is, which is explained in the 2nd book [b:Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues|12766833|Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues (White Trash Zombie, #2)|Diana Rowland|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328080041s/12766833.jpg|17910832]. This doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of hints in this one, there are. However, in the 2nd book we also get to have a medical explanation. It doesn't delve too deep in the subject like [a:Mira Grant|3153776|Mira Grant|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1282493757p2/3153776.jpg]'s Newsflesh Trilogy does, but it's satisfying and looks, at least to me, well though out.

In conclusion: I liked this one. It was fun, exciting, had intelligent parts realistic information and even an honest attempt in character development. It was much more than I expected when I first picked it up. I can't wait for the 3rd book to come out.

PS.The audiobook has the most redneck sounding narrator EVER and it's FUN! show less

A case study in excellent book titles. The minute I saw this one, I had to read the description...which turned out to sound pretty fun to both me and Areg. So we downloaded it and read it together and it was, indeed, great fun.

Not to say there aren't some heavy bits. "White trash" is in the title, but it's not treated as a joke--Angel and her father both have poverty, addictions, and domestic trauma to deal with, and she's also coping with emotional and physical abuse, and a criminal record that limits her options for escape dramatically. Still, Angel and her dad push back against the label, and it definitely is damaging to Angel's self-image, which makes me feel a bit guilty for seeing it in juxtaposition to "zombie" and immediately show more thinking, "fun". I won't say that no one in this book turns out to be trash, because Angel's boyfriend really has no redeeming qualities, but by the end, it's hard to imagine our narrator saying the title out loud with anything but the deadpan humor that I read into it, and which made it so enticing.

Anyway, plot:

Angel's in her early 20s (I think) and a high school dropout who's done time in prison thanks to the people she associates with, works a series of minimum-wage jobs, and she takes non-prescribed prescription drugs to cope when she can't avoid being in the same house as her alcoholic, abusive father. So no one's really surprised when she wakes up in the hospital after a suspected overdose with no memory of the hours leading up to it. No, the surprising part is that she's there after being found naked by the highway not too far from where a headless corpse was discovered.

But angel has a mysterious benefactor, someone who's sent her clothes, a six-pack of special smoothies to help her recover, and a job as a morgue driver (along with a vaguely threatening note to tell her parole officer if she can't keep it). Keeping the job turns out not to be a problem. The morgue's staff's initial confusion at how she, of all people, got the job is quickly replaced with collegial respect as she works hard and proves particularly unsqueamish, even at the sight of more decapitated corpses and her first autopsy. What they don't know is that Angel's found one particular aspect of the autopsy--and the organ it reveals--to be not only fascinating but, well, delicious.

Angel's figuring out the whole zombie thing on her own, but it's the people in her circle who push this book from fun-and-forget-it fluff to a little something more. Her alcoholic father's had his own rough past with his former wife and lost job, and Rowland handles this well--never excusing his terrible treatment of Angel while still allowing him to be human. Angel's complicated feelings about him, and about her on-again-off-again boyfriend (who, yeah, is a bit more a character type), save her from the single-moment-changed-everything trope and keep her nuanced and interesting. Meanwhile, her coworkers at the morgue might be unrealistically supportive, but dang it, Areg and I liked that. There's enough crap in Angel's life without hostile coworkers--why not let her have some who respect her hard work, ask her along to meals, and encourage her to break out of her bad situation without acting all holier-than-thou? It's the kind of fantasy we both wanted.

And I guess that's what I mean when I say that this book was fun. Despite the things Angel deals with, there's an optimism that we both found refreshing in light of our usual media intake, where even the hopeful endings are complicated. It's possible for life to be complicated and hopeful. show less

So every thing happens sooo slow in this book. But that's not really a bad thing in my opinion.

Angel is like any ordinary person and that may seem like an odd choice for a book about zombie's. She doesn't kick ass, smile when someone asks her to, does stuff she doesn't really want to do but circumstances, or her not wanting to be seen as rude, forces her.

I don't think I can explain it very well in English but to me Angel was more anti-heroine than not. And not even that. She isn't evil or misunderstood. She just was a person who had a shitty life. After being turned into a zombie she gets a second chance. And she wants to make the most of it. So she tries. I found that very refreshing. Because all her doubts were very relate able. And show more she didn't transform into something extraordinary. Nop she was still her own person but now with something extra.

She was a bit thick though. Not that that was bad but I'm someone who has multiple scenario's for everything I do. And I'm a bit impulsive. So to read about someone who isn't... well it was interesting.

I do think the audiobook made this more fun. The narrator did an excellent job with the accent and all (I don't know if she had the correct accent. I'm not an american so what do I know). show less

Angel remembers blood. LOTS and lots of blood, she remembers teeth and bones... when she wakes up in the hospital. But, there isn't a scratch on her, she's whole and in tact with a nurse telling her she overdosed on a pill buffet.

She decided she's had enough of the hospital- she's leaving. She rips her IV out, when another nurse comes into tell her that two detectives want to talk to her about a body that was found not far from were she was discovered... NAKED- OD'ed on the side on the road. But she doesn't remember anything!

The nurse gives her a bag containing clothes, a note that tells her she has a new job driving the van for the morgue and these shake things with instructions to drink one only every other day.

Her first day on the show more job, while watching her very first autopsy...

"A dead man. Buck *ss naked with his shriveled little junk right there for everyone to see." -Angel upon seeing her first dead body.

Now, Angel can't figure out why she suddenly has the over-whelming urge to scoop this dead guys brains out of his skull with a spoon and eat them like ice cream.

Dude, as you can imagine she is more than a little freaked out by this unusual brain craving- but she fights it and goes on about her day.

The realization finally hits her that she is an actual ZOMBIE after she is out on a call one night and a rotted, gross guy tries to attack her for the body in the back of her van!Now, she has a LOT of questions! But WHO is she supposed to ask? Sure some anonymous person or zombie more likely has been leaving her notes and helping her 'survive' but how is she supposed to contact them?

Then there is Deputy Inanov... Marcus. You know, the same guy who arrested her for stealing a car (that she almost didn't know was stolen when she 'bought' it) Marcus is also insanely hot, wicked sweet, totally caring... hot, kind, sensitive... HOT. But, how can she like him like THAT? But how can she NOT? The bigger question is does HE like her like that? Or is he just a sweet, concerned and incredibly sexy police man?

"Yeah, right. I'm finally getting my life together. Too bad I had to die first." -Angel

The end of this book will totally shock you, I SO didn't see THAT coming!! My Life as a White Trash Zombie is total awesomeness. I loved watching angel go from pill-popping reject, to a mature, respectable brain-eating adult. show less

Angel is a pill-popping high school dropout with an alcoholic father and absolutely no direction in life. Then one night she suffers an overdose -- and maybe a car crash, although her memory is fuzzy -- and after that everything is different, starting with the fact that some mysterious person has left her a six-pack of some kind of weirdly meaty slushy drinks and a note saying she now has a job at the local morgue that she never applied for. Something really strange has happened to her, but she doesn't actually mind very much. In fact, being undead may be just what she needs to turn her life around. Now if she could just figure out why all those headless bodies keep turning up...

So, it's a zombie story with the kind of setup that you show more usually get in vampire tales, except that instead of craving blood, our protagonist has a hankering for brains. I honestly can't decide whether that constitutes a clever twist on familiar supernatural tropes, or an unimaginative re-purposing of a familiar formula. Ultimately, I'm not sure I care much, though, because either way this turned out to be a quick, fun, surprisingly entertaining read, and apparently that's exactly what I was in the mood for. (I don't recommend reading it while eating, though. It gets pretty gross in places.) I'm not going to be rushing right out to get the next book in the series, but I liked this one enough that I'm definitely interested in reading it eventually.

Rating: I'm rather surprised to find myself giving this one a 4/5. But, while it's not exactly aiming for any great literary heights, what it does it does pretty well. show less

How could you not read a book with a title and cover like this?! It's impossible to pass up! I was glad the story lived up to the high expectations set by the badass cover-art, it was unique, fun, and well written. Angel goes from being a low life pill addict with an abusive father and asshole boyfriend, to nearly dead in an accident. She doesn't have much memory of what happened but apparently she overdosed on a boatload of pills even though she's convinced she was actually in a car wreck. As if that's not weird enough she's given a note and a case full of drinks when she's discharged from the hospital. She's to drink one of the weird drinks a day and then report to the morgue for a job. If she doesn't.... well, some of her former show more felonies will bite her in the ass. Suddenly she has a schedule, a job (which she surprisingly likes), and is clean (after the accident drugs and alcohol seem to have no effect on her). Her white trash life has been turned around! Only there is one problem.... she discovers she might actually be a zombie. Her job at the morgue could be a lot more crucial for her survival then she thought. Fun with a little hint of mystery this is a fun start to a series that I would love to finish! show less