Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

From the book jacket: R is a young man with an existential crisis–he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse, but he has dreams.

After experiencing a teenage boy’s memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and strangely sweet relationship with the victim’s human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.

Scary, funny, and surprisingly poignant, Warm Bodies is about being alive, being dead, and the blurry line in between.

From christina:

I was hesitant to read this one. The main protagonist is a zombie? And wait, I’ll love him? Really? Pfft. Aren’t we supposed to like, chase them with baseball bats and stuff? But because my friends are pushy persistent,  I gave it a go, and THANK GOD because within the first few pages, I knew this was something special.

R isn’t your ordinary zombie. Don’t get me wrong, he still grunts and shuffles, he eats the occasional brain, and is sort of… decomposing, but he rides the escalators for fun and listens to music.  He misses the rhythms of speech and has foster kids, he wants to remember his name. He has a million questions but no answers. HE WEARS A RED TIE (which I know doesn’t sound that important right now, but trust me. mkay?)  R wants to be alive.

And hold on you guys, Nicholas Hoult is playing R in the movie adaptation.

SO, R and the other zombies are living in an abandoned airport, and in doing what zombies do (searching for brains, natch), R happens to save a human girl named Julie. And it’s here that we really start to see R’s transformation and Isaac Marion’s exquisite gift for storytelling. While I love pretty prose as much as the next girl, I get discouraged when it becomes more about flowery words and less about what’s actually happening. That never happens here.  His voice is liquid and beautiful, without ever overpowering the actual story.

Seriously, I was in awe.

Isaac takes us from R’s thoughts to dreams, to the vivid memories of Julie’s dead boyfriend and back again – without ever missing a step. The world is in ruins and the change in R as the story progresses left me unable to put this down. He made a zombie charming, what more can I say?

One of my favorite paragraphs:

“I think the world has mostly ended because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don’t know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it’s not so important. Once you’re arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which road you took.”

I give this one:
Swoony Boy Alert
I Will Reswoon Soon
Straight to the Favorites Pile

I get fangirl crazy over this book. In fact, I loved it so much that we’ll be giving away a SIGNED copy on twitter in the coming weeks. Stay tuned to find out more.

About the author: Isaac Marion was born in north-western Washington in 1981 and has lived in and around Seattle his whole life, working a variety of strange jobs like delivering deathbeds to hospice patients and supervising parental visits for foster-kids. He is not married, has no children, and did not go to college or win any prizes. Warm Bodies is his first novel.