Kirsty McKay
Chicken House, 2012
$17.99, Hardcover
978-0545381888
Genre: Horror
Age: 13+
Description: Bobby doesn’t really know where she belongs. Born in
England, she moved to the U.S. when she was nine for her mother’s job. Sadly,
her father passed away from cancer and now her mother has moved them back to
the UK. She’s a bit of an outsider at school and is bored on her class’s field
trip to remote areas of Scotland for a skiing vacation. On their bus ride back
home, Bobby refuses to go inside the little roadside café. She stays in the bus
with Smitty, the school “rebel” and tries to while away the time. When the bus
gets bumped by a car and the bus driver goes out to investigate and doesn’t
come back they begin to worry. When Alice, the most stuck up girl in class,
comes running aboard the bus demanding they baracade themselves in Bobby and
Smitty think she’s lost it. She claims that their teacher tried to attack her
and everyone else in the café has turned into zombies. Suddenly, they notice
the eerie quiet of the area and see blood in the snow. They rescue their bus
driver and he starts to get them away from the café when their teacher barrels
out and tries to attack the bus. Stuck at a gas station up the road, they get
some more help from Pete the albino nerd in their class who ran the minute he
saw something weird was going on. Soon they put two and two together—the weird
dude seeing “Carrot Man Veggie Juice” must have had something to do with it. As
they start taking out zombies and making their way back to the café they begin
to uncover clues that makes Pete’s paranoia that “the man” is behind the
infection look not so crazy after all.
Opinion: Originally a British book by McKay who now lives in Boston,
Undead is a unique entry in the zombie
world of YA fiction. A lot of the first book actually takes place with the
teens stuck in the school bus and having to fortify a harder than usual means
of safety which also happens to be a possible means of escape too. The other
scenes include the gas station, the café, and a castle they eventually take
refuge in. Bobby is a resourceful girl, Smitty the “bad” boy who isn’t really
all that bad (and has a wicked scene of humor), Alice is the stuck up girl that
wouldn’t have given any of them the time of day, and Pete the poor nerd. It’s
cute that the twist to the story that makes it different from other zombie
novels is that no one wants to believe Pete’s conspiracy theory but as they
begin to uncover clues (everyone who drank the Carrot Juice turned, there was a
huge tree blocking their only exit out of town, and the hi-tech video surveillance
in the office of the café suggests someone wanted to watch what went down, all
culminate with the discovery that Bobby’s mom might be working for an evil
corporation and Bobby and her friends might be the only ones to save the whole
of Scotland from being infected. The pace of the book for the most part is a
bit slow but that doesn’t mean it is boring. The ending has the classic Nightmare on Elm Street (“we’re all safe
now . . . “) feel to it but is successful instead of being campy leaving room
for readers to be blissfully ignorant of a horrible future for the teens or
leaving readers hoping for more.
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