Fiction Book Review for ‘Zombies v. Ninjas: Origins’ by R.A. Barnes and Marble City Publishing.
Overall I liked this book. It was an easy and enjoyable read. The main character is a psychiatrist who takes martial arts classes for a hobby and to help keep in shape. When the dead started coming back to life, it was his martial arts class that led the charge on hunting down these zombies and chopping their heads off. I think that the explanation for how these zombies possibly came to be is quite ingenious. It is speculated in the book that a local meat packing/slaughterhouse company was trying to cut costs by feeding the cows feed that had cow meat in it as filler, therefore turning the cows into unintentional cannibals and triggering a curse that was thought to be just stories. Apparently the undertakers had a “code” of sorts and had all been taught to cut the heads off of the dead to prevent them from rising again. The undertakers were the only ones who were privy to the zombie information and had been keeping it from the general public, but something happened to make them start rising sooner than they were used to, and they could no longer keep it a secret. There was also an interesting twist to a zombie story by having them reproduce. The female were becoming pregnant by parthenogenesis. I thought that was neat.
Critiques: I’m going to give this a 4 star rating because I really did enjoy the story. There are a few things that stuck out to me though that I will mention here. One is about the punctuation. I’m in the US, so I don’t know if this is common in other countries, but in this book the author used single quotation marks instead of double. I’m used to reading single quotes only when used inside of double quotes so this was a bit distracting.
One content issue that I would have pointed out if I had edited this is that one zombie got her head chopped off in a hair salon and nobody seemed to notice or react to it. The hairdresser just happened to be the daughter of one of the undertakers, so knew about zombies, and was also a member of the ninja club. Her regular customer walked in and at first she didn’t know something was wrong and began to work on her hair. As soon as she realized the woman was a zombie, she chopped her head off. I don’t know how nobody in town noticed this, unless there was absolutely nobody in the shop but herself, and nobody outside on the streets looking in.
The other issue is that to me, the main character, Ruby, was hard to relate to. He was too much of a male pig for my tastes. Throughout the book he blatantly flirts with a doctor colleague that he has a crush on, yet he has a wife and children at home. He seems to disregard his wife as anything other than someone who takes care of the kids and cooks his dinner. I got the impression that he didn’t really respect her at all and took her for granted.
Disclaimer: I received this book from LibraryThing for free in exchange for posting an honest review.
Overall I liked this book. It was an easy and enjoyable read. The main character is a psychiatrist who takes martial arts classes for a hobby and to help keep in shape. When the dead started coming back to life, it was his martial arts class that led the charge on hunting down these zombies and chopping their heads off. I think that the explanation for how these zombies possibly came to be is quite ingenious. It is speculated in the book that a local meat packing/slaughterhouse company was trying to cut costs by feeding the cows feed that had cow meat in it as filler, therefore turning the cows into unintentional cannibals and triggering a curse that was thought to be just stories. Apparently the undertakers had a “code” of sorts and had all been taught to cut the heads off of the dead to prevent them from rising again. The undertakers were the only ones who were privy to the zombie information and had been keeping it from the general public, but something happened to make them start rising sooner than they were used to, and they could no longer keep it a secret. There was also an interesting twist to a zombie story by having them reproduce. The female were becoming pregnant by parthenogenesis. I thought that was neat.
Critiques: I’m going to give this a 4 star rating because I really did enjoy the story. There are a few things that stuck out to me though that I will mention here. One is about the punctuation. I’m in the US, so I don’t know if this is common in other countries, but in this book the author used single quotation marks instead of double. I’m used to reading single quotes only when used inside of double quotes so this was a bit distracting.
One content issue that I would have pointed out if I had edited this is that one zombie got her head chopped off in a hair salon and nobody seemed to notice or react to it. The hairdresser just happened to be the daughter of one of the undertakers, so knew about zombies, and was also a member of the ninja club. Her regular customer walked in and at first she didn’t know something was wrong and began to work on her hair. As soon as she realized the woman was a zombie, she chopped her head off. I don’t know how nobody in town noticed this, unless there was absolutely nobody in the shop but herself, and nobody outside on the streets looking in.
The other issue is that to me, the main character, Ruby, was hard to relate to. He was too much of a male pig for my tastes. Throughout the book he blatantly flirts with a doctor colleague that he has a crush on, yet he has a wife and children at home. He seems to disregard his wife as anything other than someone who takes care of the kids and cooks his dinner. I got the impression that he didn’t really respect her at all and took her for granted.
Disclaimer: I received this book from LibraryThing for free in exchange for posting an honest review.
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