Age: High school+

Back cover: "In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska's ice. Thus was Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.
But on its final test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.
Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastates and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenage boy to support, but she she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history."

The main characters were the biggest let down. Briar Wilkes' character doesn't have one unique quality about it. Her character is formed by the plot and she doesn't stick out in any way or offer any emotional characteristics. When she enters her devastated city, there is no real emotional response. There's one line at the very end of the book where she wishes that someone would come in and exterminate all the zombies because they were people once--and that's about it. No nostalgia. No reflection. Nothing. Zeke Wilkes is a believable teenage boy with his reckless behavior, egotism, and aptness to make mistakes. Although it's annoying, it's believable and I liked it. However, I got ultra-peeved at the end when he's gleefully skipping around his house in search of answers after just having witnessed people dying and almost dying himself. He didn't exactly mature through the experience, did he? Another reviewer pointed out that the two main characters' biggest flaws was their complete lack of control over their situations. They were being pushed and pulled by different people from this building to this passage to this road.

Priest had a way of losing me in her action scenes, where I couldn't imagine it happening in my mind's eye.

Amidst these large qualms, I'm a bit indifferent about the book. It was okay. The plot was interesting, unique, and moved along nicely. I liked the brown font. 's about it, I guess.