Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion



Release Date: April 26, 2011
Publisher: Atria
Age Group: Adult
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Pages: 256
Buy: Fountain Bookstore / Amazon
Description: Amazon
R is a young man with an existential crisis--he is a zombie. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he has dreams. His ability to connect with the outside world is limited to a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing.

After experiencing a teenage boy's memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and stragely sweet relationship with the victim's human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His choice to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.

Warm Bodies is a strange and wonderful merger of the sick and twisted and the sweet and poignant. It is a gritty, graphic love letter to life penned by a dead man relearning what it truly means to be alive.

Isaac Marion's debut novel will forever change the way you think of zombies. In a matter of pages, I had almost forgotten that R was one. (And no, he's not some hot guy who just happens to be deceased. He groans and shambles.)The set-up to this novel is so well done that I bought in instantly. Instead of seeing R and his kind as "zombies" and the living as "people" I found it easy to subscribe to R's worldview.

Zombies are the Dead. Everyone else is Living. Pulse or not, they are all human.

That was what amazed me about this book. Believability was never an issue. Through R and Julie's friendship it became easy to see both sides as a struggle for survival. The curse is at fault. It is the root cause of R's condition and Julie's misery. It has ruined the world they share and made for a bleak existence.

The world and characters Marion has created force you as a reader to question what makes us human. Is it as simple as a state of being? Is the ability to articulate and outwardly express emotion what defines us as people? Does having a pulse make you any more or less human?

Well, read it and find out...