aliceinzombieland

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Alice in Zombieland

Gena Showalter

Showalter, Gena. Alice in Zombieland. Harlequin Books. Ontario, Canada. 2012.

Alice in Zombieland is a horrific spin on the classic fantasy tale, Alice in Wonderland. Gena Showalter delivers another fantastic book that captivates readers from the moment they glance at the cover. She has received many awards for her different supernatural young adult novels, and Alice in Zombieland is no exception.

Alice is a young girl that is very bored. She is wandering outside and she sees a curious white rabbit that is wearing a coat and bleeding heavily from its side. She follows the rabbit through the forest and she comes upon a large hole in the ground that is presumably the rabbit’s. While leaning over the hole to look down into the strangely swirling darkness, she loses her footing and slips into the pit, finding that it is larger than she thought. She falls through empty, cold air. When Alice sees the ground, she thinks that she is going to fall to her death. But as she gets closer, her fall slows until she lightly touches the floor with a slight tap.

Shaking, Alice explores her surroundings until she is able to squeeze through a small door. She finds herself in a desolate wasteland, with seemingly no life in sight. The only things she see are bodies—some human, some animal—and some strange creatures that she’s never seen before. As Alice searches for any sign of survival, she starts seeing strange creatures in the shadows. When she finally confronts one of these entities, she finds that it is a human or animal infected with a virus that causes them to eat the flesh of living beings.

Just as it tackles her and rears back to sink its fangs into her neck, something shoots it and it falls onto the ground, twitching and groaning, until it dissolves into dust. Alice finds that she was saved by a resistance, a ragged group of survivors including the mysterious white rabbit. They tell her how their world was ravaged by zombies, and how the zombies are slowly killing everything. They were sent up to the “Big Green World” to find a girl that would save them all. Alice learns that her destiny was bigger than she ever could have imagined, and that she has to find a way to stop the zombies from leaving this land and finding their way to Earth, and save the last ruins of a land once full of wonder.

Alice in Zombieland is a scary yet strangely satisfying coming of age story that teaches adolescents about how the most unlikely people can do extraordinary things. Gena Showalter brings her well-developed characters to life, reminding us of the old voice of Lewis Carroll, except with a new twist in Alice’s rebellious attitude. Teenagers and young adults will not be able to put this novel down as Alice struggles to save everything she knows and tries to find out who she really is on the inside.

4 out of 5 stars

Contributed by L. Hansen

January 15th, 2013