S.K. Munt's Reviews > The First Days

5 Zombie Stars



This was just a straight-up good Zombie book, and has basically everything I look for in a Zombie adventure: Lots of time in cars on the highway, lots of foraging, the building of forts and the banding together of people. It's nicely paced- so it goes minute by minute and day by day without skipping large sections of time, the zombies are how zombies ought to be with nothing fancy thrown into the mix, and the writer's got the goods as far as world building goes and paints (what one can only presume) is a fairly realistic account of how things would play out when the shit virus hits the fan.

The characters are the best aspect of the book for me. I like the shifting, third-person POV, because it's defined clearly, and the characters whose POV you do get to experience things through are incredibly likeable, albeit, they can get on the whiny side- lots of survivor guilt, guilt over killing humans before they can turn, guilt for the people they couldn't protect… etc etc, but that begin said, still a huge improvement over the uber-male zombie books when no one gives a f%$# about anyone.

For all intents and purposes, I think Katie is supposed to be the main character, but it's Jenny who I think really adds some spark to what could have been an otherwise generic story.She's a bit crazy and has a lot of issues, but though her mind doesn't work well- I like the way it works :)

It took a while for me to realise that this series was going to be told from a primarily female POV, and was also written by one, and though my husband is a huge fan of this series, he has grumbled occasionally, that the she-power is a little much. While I don't agree that anything the women do can be considered extra-ordinary or uber-feminazi, I will admit that the male characters tend to come down on the 'soft' side of things. (Travis and his gun issues, for instance- WTF?) Nothing wrong with that, because naturally there would be men who would struggle to hold their S$%# together during a Zombie apocalypse too, so I'm not going to blame the two female leads for dwarfing men with their strength. It would take a lot of guts and killer instincts to survive an ordeal like this- and we're reading a story from a Survivors side of things, right? If not, there would be three paragraphs and then a lot of demonic growling…

What's wrong with it? Not much. Travis can get on my nerves sometimes (I really like strong men- which is possible without them having to come off as Rambo and Travis can be a bit spineless, so Juan's my favourite) and I had some issues with how quickly Katie rebounded. Okay, you like men and women too, so by all means- have at this new dish now that your wife is dead, but while she was humming and hawing about it being too soon for her to be considering jumping into someone else's arms- I tended to agree and couldn't believe that she was even contemplating it yet. I think maybe two weeks had lapsed between death of a wife, and want of another partner? That's okay in Jenny's 'battered wife' case and would even make sense if Katie's wife was still alive, and Katie's feelings were merely splitting (proving them to be not so strong in the first place)… but the emphasis on her desire for Travis struck me as highly inappropriate for a grieving widow, and didn't make sense given how much time Katie spends grieving, moping, sulking… etc etc over her darling Lydia. As much as I like the emerging relationship, I wish that the writer had left the notion of her having any feelings for Travis- at all- until at least the second novel, and then maybe a month down the line.

In the same vein- I don't think that Jenny has mourned the loss of her children nearly enough, and the fact that she forgot her step-son for even ten minutes horrified me. I have a step-daughter and I can tell you that worry for her would be at the top of my priority list despite how much I was grieving or in shock over the loss of my biological children. it sort of made her look like a shitty mother, and I'm wondering if maybe that was the author's intentions. No one's perfect, after all, and Jenny has clearly been in need of a mental tidy for awhile, but I hope this issue is touched on again. In the very least, I'd like to see her go into shock once or twice when encountering a zombie child. I mean, my kids are alive, and I still can't stomach zombie kids in movies.

But i digress- these are only minor criticisms in an otherwise awesome story. I'm already onto book two, so it';s a page turner, no doubt, and would like to commend Rhiannon Frater for pulling off an incredibly suspenseful and often nail-biting series, without having to go all game Of thrones or Walking Dead, and kill off all of the important or favoured characters to add to the shock value!