BookLook Review "When We Were Romans"

“When We Were Romans”

The novel “When We Were Romans” by Matthew Kneale describes a family in crisis through the eyes of nine year old Lawrence. His family lives in fear that the father will return from Scotland and harm them. Lawrence’s mother hurriedly loads his little sister Jemima and a few belongings including his precious pet and they drive through the underwater chunnel to Rome.

Lawrence’s mum used to live in Rome when she was single and still has friends there where they hope to find refuge and start over. Spending a few days with each of them, the little family seems to be getting on their feet with the help of an interesting cast of characters. And then their world unravels again. Despite his efforts, our young narrator cannot save his family from itself.

There are similarities to other recent novels including “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” which use a child as narrator. The mysterious adult world described by a precocious child is always an amusing and bewildered perspective. They cannot understand what is really happening around them which causes the reader to be equally confused at times.

One of the charming aspects of the novel is that young Lawrence assigns animals to adults as he meets them and uses the phonetic spelling of a young child. A woman who is small with dark hair and gives quick little kisses as greetings reminds him of a squirrel. She is labeled “Chintsier squirrel”. Another is “Crissy chick” since her hair is short, yellow and stands straight up. He is also fascinated by his new book describing past rulers of Rome and sums up their history in his funny misspelled childish style. “One day there was a big fire in Rome, it went on for days, and some people said Nero did it because he was emporer but nobody was sure. Thousands of famous temples and houses got burnt down and Nero went up a tower to watch, he said doesn’t it look beautiful and then he sang a long song.” His version of history is much more entertaining and simplified than a high school history text.

I suppose I would only give this book 2 out of 5 stars if I did that sort of rating. I don’t usually since it is too restrictive and often misleading in a book review. There were things I really liked about this book, and things I didn’t. It did have moments of great reading but it also had sections that didn’t quite ring true. I give it a guarded recommendation to those interested in the struggles of children and adolescents dealing with the confusion of living in a dysfunctional family.

BookLook Review "On Stranger Tides"

BookLook
Debbie Balzotti
“On Stranger Tides”
Captain Jack Sparrow will soon take to the seas again and the script is based on the 1987 pirate novel, “On Stranger Tides” by award-winning fantasy author Tim Powers. Tim(oddly both writers are named Tim)Elliott, the co-writer of the first three “Pirates” movies said the story of the novel aligned with where they wanted to take the fourth film being filmed in Hawaii this summer. “We wanted to do a story about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth, and Tim Powers wrote a book about Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth... it just turns out that to do that story you would need that book," said Elliott. Therefore, we all must read this book now since everyone else will soon be doing it.
“On Stranger Tides” is great story-telling. It’s as fast as a pirate ghost ship skimming the tops of turquoise Caribbean waves. It is also just as shallow – don’t expect too much since this is a tall tale after all. An insane British scientist brings his lovely young daughter Elizabeth to meet up with Blackbeard himself on a quest for the Fountain of Youth. John Chandagnac, a handsome young man also headed for Jamaica is forced to join the pirates and is renamed Jack Shandy. We now have another Captain Jack who is more Orlando Bloom than Johnny Depp. And we have another beautiful Elizabeth who also runs around in a white nightgown. Pirate movie images do appear in your mind as you read this book and I would wager a gold doubloon that Tim Elliott read this book before he wrote the first two movie scripts. They are just too similar.
Black magic and voodoo dominate the story and the characters. There is an abundance of sorcery and creepy creatures returning from the dead to dance around on ghostly ship decks. The addition of legendary pirates who actually existed makes the book even more interesting. Their true stories are woven into the tall tale with skillful exaggeration. It’s not a book for young readers or book clubs, but those who enjoy historical fantasy writing will be thrilled and chilled by it.
We all know the book is better than the movie, so be sure to read “On Stranger Tides” before the movie comes out in May 2011. And thank you Springville super librarian John Averett for searching for the book for months to place it on our shelves. It should be arriving soon. You may want to call the library to see if it has been added to the collection. Now everyone please check it out to prove my prediction of its inevitable popularity!

"Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" Good Choice for Book Clubs

BookLook Review
Debbie Balzotti

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover – and its title. The shimmering cover photo design has two children walking under very different umbrellas. The young girl is carrying a beautiful Japanese parasol and the boy, wearing pants that are a little too short, is hidden under a plain American style green umbrella. The title printed across the top, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet”, called to me from the library shelf and I’m glad I listened.

Author Jamie Ford has written an impressive award winning novel. He is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung who came from China and adopted the Western name “Ford”. It’s a bit confusing to think of Ford as a Chinese American author, but his perspective helps the characters come alive for the reader. The writing is not particularly brilliant but it is so nice to find a book of historical fiction that doesn’t jar the reader with gory violent details, or coarse language that you can overlook his inexperience. It has rapidly become a best seller despite being a debut novel for Ford.

The cast of characters is unique for the 1940’s back story. Henry Lee is a 12 year old Chinese boy who befriends a young Japanese American girl Keiko at their otherwise all-white school. His other friend is an adult African American Jazz musician named Sheldon. This unlikely trio provides a unique view of the infamous round up of Japanese Americans in Seattle and their relocation to internment camps during World War II.

The story of the present day begins in 1986 as Henry watches the once beautiful Panama Hotel begin its path to renovation with a press announcement. The Panama Hotel stood as a gateway between Chinatown and Japantown in Seattle during the war years. It was boarded up and survived demolition until a buyer decided to return it to its former glory. In the basement she discovered hundreds of boxes and crates hidden by Japanese families as they were suddenly forced to leave everything behind. Henry hopes to find the belongings of his childhood friend Keiko.

The title “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” does predict the story inside. The story has a few surprises but is mostly dependable as it takes the reader between two time periods and two cultures. Life is bitter and sweet. Decisions are made which bring heartbreak and joy. Commitments are kept and broken and love and forgiveness are possible along the journey.

"Sand Sharks"

After so many "creepy book" reviews by Mr. Terry, I thought you'd like a little variety to spice up your life.
Debbie Balzotti
BookLook Review
I was looking for a recorded book that wouldn’t make me blush if someone heard me listening to it. Well, “Sand Sharks” didn’t have any descriptive shower scenes, or graphic blood and gore but it was embarrassing none-the-less. If I could have put a plain brown paper wrapper around the reader’s irritating voice I would have. Driving to Salt Lake City every week, I like to listen to an audio book in the car. I can’t listen very long to NPR without my blood pressure rising and local chat causes me to talk back to the people on the radio who can’t even hear me. Books pleasantly pass the commute time and help me arrive in a good mood despite the eternal construction delays on I15 - usually.

“Sand Sharks” written by Margaret Maron (Maron, not moron) is a novel somewhere in the middle of a mystery series featuring Judge Deborah Knott. She’s an idiot. I don’t like her. And she has my name! I don’t care about her personal life lurking in the background and I really don’t care about her southern friends. Words wasted on the descriptions of everything she eats and drinks are also irritating. What made the story worse was the chirpy narrator’s voice dragging me through the ridiculous plot.

Beware the enticing description on the back of the cover. “Margaret Maron (moron) never fails to deliver electrifying tales and well-wrought characters.” I guess there’s always a first time Margaret. The story is littered with meaningless clues and concludes with a surprise killer you could never guess since the author didn’t seem sure herself who was going to be the murderer. I liked the idea of the setting being in a North Carolina beach town but found myself annoyed by the obvious name-dropping of stores and restaurants. I wonder how much advertising cash they paid out to be mentioned.

Skip this 8 disc disaster and find something better in the library audio book collection. I really appreciate our library keeping it well stocked with new selections since they are expensive to buy and rarely worth listening to again. I wanted to be fair (and optimistically hoped the book would get better) so I endured to the end. It didn’t improve. I’m sure other people will check out this narration when they read “will leave readers awash in well-laid clues” but I can’t recommend it. It may even qualify as verbal abuse.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by Seth Grahame-Smith

(New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010)

Hardcover, 337 Pages, Historical Fiction

ISBN: 9780446563086, US$21.99

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? —Edgar Allan Poe

FACTS

1. For over 250 years, between 1607 and 1865, vampires thrived in the shadows of America. Few humans believed in them.
2. Abraham Lincoln was one of the gifted vampire hunters of his day, and kept a secret journal about his lifelong war against them.
3. Rumors of the journal’s existence have long been a favorite topic among historians and Lincoln biographers. Most dismiss it as myth.

From the Cover: Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother’s bedside. She’s been stricken with something the old-timers call “Milk Sickness.” “My baby boy…” she whispers. Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother’s fatal affliction was actually the work if a vampire. When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, “Henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose…” Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House. While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving the Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years. Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time—all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.

My Review: So, when I learned back in October that Quirk books would (1) be publishing a prequel to their wildly successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and that (2) it would not be penned by PPZ scribe Seth Grahame-Smith, I was very disappointed. However, I then learned in November that it was because Grahame-Smith was writing his own book: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I think that Grahame-Smith made the right decision. For, as fun as the PPZ prequel was (and I think Grahame-Smith would have made it better than Hockensmith managed) had Grahame-Smith decided to reenter Austen’s zombified universe, the world would have been denied the raucous history-rewriting adventure that is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

I think that what I enjoyed most about this book was Grahame-Smith’s devotion to the central conceit: chiefly, that vampires have been a part of America’s history, to the point that all of the major events of America’s birth are directly attributable to vampire influence. Grahame-Smith even goes so far as to rewrite his own history to fit the events of the novel, writing himself into the Abraham Lincoln-vampire timeline. My only “complaint” (for lack of a better word) about this total commitment to “historical accuracy” is that I wish Grahame-Smith had taken it the final step and made the whole book look like a work of nonfiction complete with an index and faux-Works Cited/Bibliography page. I think that would have gone a long way further down the road to making this seem even more real than it already does.

That aside, however, the book is an amazing read: unputdownable even. I blasted through it in about three days and thoroughly enjoyed ever minute of it, which at this point (now that my Winter Quarter is over) is the best thing I could ask of a book. What’s more, though, is this is not a brainless book. In fact, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a surprisingly smart book. There is a lot of interesting things going on in the book with race and class (as represented by the vampires).

I used the word “raucous” earlier to describe ALVH and I really cannot come up with a better description than that. This is a raucous adventure book that has a lot of fun with its central idea and even manages to serve up some surprises. The ending caught me completely off guard, and there are a number of fun cameos within its pages. When it comes to the strange and weird, Seth Grahame-Smith does it better than anyone I have come across in a very long time … and he certainly enjoys doing it, which translates into a joy for the Reader to pick up.

Make no bones about it, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a page-turner that will keep you up and reading into the early hours of the morning … begging for more. I eagerly await Grahame-Smith’s next project…

Under the Dome (Audio)

by Stephen King

read by Raúl Esparza

with an Afterword by The Author

(New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2009)

MP3 Audiobook, 2.88 GB, 34.4 Hours, Fiction

ISBN: 9780743597302, US$75.00

From the Cover: On an otherwise normal, beautiful day, the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine is suddenly and inexplicably sealed off from the rest of the world in Under the Dome, Stephen King’s biggest, most riveting novel since The Stand.

My Review: So, I feel like I am in an abusive relationship with Stephen King.

When we first started our relationship together, he was wonderful. He never failed to disappoint, he was intriguing, he had interesting things to say, I enjoyed spending time with him, and even lost track of time when we were together. Then, after fifteen or twenty years of being together, the relationship started to get a little stale, and often we had to fall back on the “good times” we used to have together, and I started looking at other people, even enjoyed spending time with other people. Then, things got violent. He would promise me something new and exciting and I would, like a fool, keep coming back in spite of the fact that I kept getting hurt. However, I kept telling myself that maybe this time it would be different. This time would be more like the early days of our relationship. Yet, in spite of all that I was hurt time and time again, some times painfully hurt. Then, just when I was about to give up entirely on our relationship and begin divorce proceedings, he came to me one more time and told me he was sorry about everything he had done over the last decade or so, and that he really had changed, and look … I can make it just like the old days. Without daring to hope for much, I started to believe what he was telling me and I went crawling back; expecting to be hurt at every turn, but daring to hope that he really had changed.

I think he has … but we’ll get to that in a minute.

After the stinker that was Duma Key and the disappointment that was Just After Sunset I had almost decided that I was going to stick with King’s earlier stuff (i.e. pre-2000) and then the hype surrounding Under the Dome started and I began to believe again … mostly because this was a retooling (and updating) of material that he had started and stopped in the late 70s and early 80s. I got the hardcover from my parents for Christmas and was able to get my hands on the audiobook and decided that that would be a much easier way in which to get through this book (given that I had readings for two classes to do as well as prep and readings for an English 101 class I was teaching and picking up King’s largest book to date (1,074) just didn’t seem feasible).

There is a lot to say about this book and I’ll try to get to it all, but we’ll see. I scrupulously (maybe even neurotically) stayed away from any and all reviews of the book in order to experience it on my own and form my own opinions of it (this was hard to do since I subscribe to a number of not just book blogs but also blogs that are concerned with the horror industry) and as of this writing, I still have not read any outside reviews of the book.

First and foremost, I will unconditionally say that this is the best Stephen King novel in at least the last four or five years (since Cell). Why? Well, since King’s accident in 1999 there has been a change in the tone of King’s novels. Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key … they’re all much different than, say, The Shining, It, The Stand. They are much more intimate novels, and I don’t know that I can explain it any better than that. They don’t seem as encompassing in their scope as some of King’s prior novels did (the exceptions to that rule are, perhaps, the last three novels in The Dark Tower series). With Under the Dome, though, some of that scope is brought back. This is a much bigger novel than any King has produced recently, not only in length, but also in scope. This is a novel on a par with The Stand and It. (Though as such, it suffers from some of the same problems that those larger novels do) and shows off King’s real talent for creating characters.

Second, this is a long book. That may be the understatement of the year, but I think it still warrants saying. In print it is 1,074 pages long, and in audio it is 34.4 hours long. It takes a major commitment to sit down and read or listen to Under the Dome. It took me 45 days to through it. Often I had to roll back the time on my iPod to remind myself what was going on if it there had been some time between listening sessions. I imagine that reading the book would present some of the same problems, though I would imagine that it would be (1) easier to backtrack in the print edition and (2) the fact that there is not only a map in the front of the book but also a Dramatis Personae list of a kind. (Though, I will say that when I was done with the audiobook and looked at the map in the front of the book, my vision of the geography of Chester’s Mill was much different than that of the map’s, and I’m not even sure that the map’s conforms entirely to King’s descriptions, in that it seems that on the map things are much closer together than they are in the book.)

Third, and this holds true for many of King’s longer books (especially It and The Stand), the build-up in the book is much more exciting than the denouement and conclusion. The set-up to Under the Dome is absolutely brilliant, and King constructs some very interesting inter-personal dynamics as things start to unravel (Second Selectman “Big Jim” Rennie is a good (if somewhat stereotypical) villain (if there was any sort of cosmic justice, he’d be played by the late-J.T. Walsh in any sort of film adaptation of the book)) but when the novel takes 900 pages to set up and only 100 to get out … it was bound to be somewhat disappointing. When the explanation for the dome arrived, I felt quite let down and it seemed more like an original Star Trek episode-like explanation (with Shatner and Nimoy and the rest) than something from Stephen King. But that kind of deus ex machina is what happens in The Stand and It and so I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different from a novel of similar length, but I was kind of hoping … I was also a little disappointed in the finale of “Big Jim” Rennie’s character. I was hoping for something a little more dramatic, once again, there is a lot of set up but very little pay-off, though one might be able to read a certain amount of karmic intervention in what happens to Rennie.

Fourth. While I miss having the late-Frank Muller growl his way through Under the Dome, and would have thought that either Campbell Scott or Ron McLarty would have been the choice to narrate this tale. I have to admit though, that Raúl Esparza (a new audio Reader to me) does an excellent job of bringing King’s words to life. My one nitpick with his reading though, is that all the children under the age of ten in the book sound like their noses are stuffed up.

What it boils down to is that if King’s next books (he has talked about an eighth Dark Tower book The Wind Through the Keyhole, writing a sequel to The Shining titled Doctor Sleep, a collection of novellas (coming out November 2010) Full Dark, no Stars, and a third part to The Talisman-Black House series) are anything like Under the Dome, I think that I’m prepared take him back, even though he’s hurt me in the past. With Under the Dome he’s promised he won’t hurt me any more.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

by Steve Hockensmith

illustrations by Patrick Arrasmith

(Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2010)

Trade Paperback, 287 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9781594744549, US$12.95

From the Cover: Readers will witness the birth of a heroine in Dawn of the Dreadfuls—a thrilling prequel set four years before the horrific events of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. As our story opens, the Bennet sisters are enjoying a peaceful life in the English countryside. They idle away the days reading, gardening, and daydreaming about future husbands—until a funeral at the local parish goes strangely and horribly awry. Suddenly corpses are springing from the soft earth—and only one family can stop them. As the bodies pile up, we watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naïve young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. Along the way, two men vie for her affections: Master Hawksworth is the powerful warrior who trains her to kill, while thoughtful Dr. Keckilpenny seeks to conquer the walking dead using science instead of strength. Will either man win the prize of Elizabeth’s heart? Or will their hearts be feasted upon by hordes of marauding zombies? Complete with romance, action, comedy, and an army of shambling corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will have Jane Austen rolling in her grave—and just might inspire her to crawl out of it!

My Review: Okay, when I first heard about Quirk Books was going to be releasing a prequel to their breakaway success Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (my review is HERE) I was of two minds. This is what I said when I first heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls:

Now, I don’t know how I feel about this one, because up until this point, Quirk Classics has had a winning formula: you take a “stuffy” classic novel and put something unexpected in it, hence Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Now, though, they’re mixing it up and creating a new text out of something that didn’t exist before. To the best of my knowledge, there was no prequel to Pride and Prejudice and so I’m somewhat dubious as to how effective this particular one will be. I would have preferred Wuthering Heights and Werewolves or Mansfield Park and Monsters or Persuasion and Poltergeists personally.

After reading Dawn … I don’t know that I am ready to back away from that statement. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like Dawn of the Dreadfuls, it just means that I need to reassess my position vis-à-vis what this book is.

It is not a strict mash-up in the way that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (reviewed HERE) were or like what I expect Android Karenina will be. This is a whole new animal and a number of times as I was reading I had to remind myself that this is not a mash-up.

Now, before we go any further, I need to mention that the copy of the book I got was an ARC that Quirk Books sent to me as part of their “All-Out-Worldwide-Zombie-Blog-Explosion-2010” wherein bloggers all over the interwebs are posting advanced reviews of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls on March 3, 2010.

That said and all that legal mumbo-jumbo out of the way … I loved this book for what it was. This is a really fun read. What Hockensmith has done a really good job of recreating Jane Austen’s style as well as recreating the feel of its predecessor. I bring this up because that was one of my chief concerns regarding this book was “Would it sound like an Austen novel?” Because that was the point of both Zombies and Sea Monsters: they simultaneously spoofed and honored Austen’s novels. They amplified Austen’s social comedies, heightening the absurdities of Austen’s time (class differences, social manners, etc.) with the inclusion of zombies or sea serpents.

I was worried that Dawn of the Dreadfuls, as a completely original novel, would not achieve the same level of pastiche and satire. As I said, above, my fears have been laid to rest (no pun intended) on that fact because Hockensmith does manage to do what Grahame-Smith and Winters accomplished before him.

In fact, Dawn of the Dreadfuls reminds me a lot of Simon Pegg’s 2004 self-described “Rom-Zom-Com” Shaun of the Dead. Much in the way that Shaun employs the conventions of zombie and horror films at the same time that it satirizes them and satirizing the conventions of a comedy of manners, Dawn of the Dreadfuls does that with not just zombie conventions, but the conventions of the Jane Austen-esque social comedy as well. Yes Dreadfuls is a zombie novel. And yes Dreadfuls is, technically speaking, a horror novel, but really, at the heart of it, Dreadfuls is a romantic comedy setting Elizabeth Bennet up in a series of pas de deux relationships (occurring in and amongst beheadings, dismemberings and devourings) that set the stage for her personality and quirks in Pride and Prejudice (and Zombies).

Now, for as much as I enjoyed the book—and I do always love a good and bloody horror story—I did have some issues with Dreadfuls.

First and foremost, the story that Hockensmith sets up in Dawn of the Dreadfuls is one that would benefit best from a sense of danger or peril for our main characters, i.e. the Bennet sisters. However, knowing that Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia all show up not just Pride and Prejudice but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies along with their father and mother, and that Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bingley and Mr. Wickham are all in the future of the Bennet sisters … there was no sense of any kind of anxiety when any of the girls are in peril during the final third of the book. This is, admittedly, a problem with any prequel and not just Dreadfuls and one which, for all of Hockensmith’s other accomplishments in the book, he is unable to overcome. There absolutely is no sense of urgency and anxiety surrounding our heroines. Certainly secondary characters are in peril, but since none of them are as strongly created as the Bennets, it is hard to make any kind of connection to Master Hawksworth, Dr. Keckilpenny, Captain Cannon and Lord Lumpley and so when they are imperiled by the hordes of undead, I had a hard time caring about them.

Perhaps this speaks to Hockensmith’s abilities to create believable and sympathetic characters since the best characters in the book are in fact Austen’s creations and everyone else are cardboard cutout characters from various horror stories. And don’t even get me started on the character of Lord Lumpley—one of the most repulsive characters I have ever had the displeasure of running across in literature, to the point that when (at the risk of spoiling) he meets his inevitable end (though from an unexpected source, I will give Hockensmith that) I was just glad that he was out of the way and I didn’t have to endure his presence in the novel any more. He really is an unpleasant and distasteful character, and not even in the good You-Love-to-Hate-Them way … he is repulsive in every sense of the word.

I was also disappointed in the character of Master Hawksworth, but I’m not sure how I could discuss the problems I had with him without giving away any major plot points, so I will leave it in the realm of generalities and say that what I found so objectionable was what Hockensmith considered a tragic flaw in Hawksworth’s character was obviously a convenient way in which to remove the character from the action at a key moment. I felt it was beneath the character and insulting to my intelligence as a Reader.

However, all of these flaws that I found with the book do not diminish the overall affect of the book and the enjoyment I had in reading it. This is a really fun romp of a book, all things considered, and while I received my copy free of charge, I was ready to shell out the cover price for the book, and at the end of the day, I would not have felt cheated of my $12.95 had I needed to pay, and neither should you. This book is well worth the price of admission. (And be sure to stick around for the great post-credits-esque cameo at the end of the novel. A lot of fun in that Ferris-Bueller-walking-down-the-hall-and-shooing-the-audience-out-of-the-theater-kind-of-way.)

Now, I should mention that the book is not available in stores for another two weeks. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will be available for purchase on Wednesday, March 24, 2010. (The link in the ISBN in the header of this post will take you to Amazon’s page for DoD where you can pre-order.) However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the gooey, bloody zombie goodness in the meantime. First of all, get thee a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies if you haven’t already. This is definitely a situation where a knowledge of the “original” (using that word loosely) adds to the experience of the sequel/prequel.

Second: you can find Dawn of the Dreadfuls online at Quirk’s page for the book HERE

(Yes, I’m shilling shamelessly for Quirk Books, but hey, free advance review copies of good books make whores of us all.)

Until next time…