My Friends Are Fiction

From my blog, My Friends Are FictionI'm mixed about Showalter's Alice in Zombieland. I was sold seeing the name and cover...Alice in Wonderland and zombies, that's going to be awesome! Well, there aren't a whole lot of similarities between the two except for the main character's name and the idea of 'falling' into an unexpected, unbelievable world. Oh, and there is a white rabbit but its a cloud shaped like a rabbit. I really think that trying to make this connection hurt the story for me personally. I would have liked it much more had I not been searching for connections between this and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Showalter also creates an entirely new type of zombie that you will either love or hate.The Story:I was riveted in the first chapter, I couldn't read it fast enough. Well, unfortunately once we reached our turning point and Alice is thrown into something unexpected I began to lose interest. There was a lot of high school drama that just seemed to go on and on. Some of the dialog was very witty and made me chuckle but some bordered on silly to me. I do think that the target audience, young adults, would appreciate the high school stuff much more than me. I can't hold that against the story since I'm not the audience written for. In the last stretch of the book I began to enjoy it more and wondered where Showalter was going.The Characters:I like Alice and think she's a strong character. Kat was good at times but it was a lot of her dialog that bordered on silly to me. We don't really get to know some of the side characters very well and even the love interest, Cole, didn't feel hundred percent fleshed out to me. I'm thinking that in the following books we'll get to know the secondary characters more. Emma, Alice's younger sister, I liked. But at times I wondered if she acted like a typical eight year old. I admit, I'm not around many eight year olds so she could be spot on.The Cover:I liked the cover, it was what drew me in at first. But after reading the book I wish that there was a bit more distance between this story and Lewis Carroll's.Final Thoughts:If you decide to read this one don't even try to compare it to Alice in Wonderland, just enjoy it for what it is.