So the first thing that was so neat to read, was that this book was set in Kansas City, Kansas, and the main character was attending Sumner Academy of Arts and Science, which is the school where I worked as a librarian before my current job! While having visited places like NYC and Chicago, and it is fun to read about places I’ve been, reading a book set in a city that I actually know like KCK made for so much connection and enjoyment for me. But enough about that one aspect of the book.

While it’s probably not actually a book filled with zombies, and probably more in the main character Zharie’s mind, it definitely kept a bit of creepy/spookiness with how she was seeing the different decaying people walking around. I laughed at the bit where she said she googled what seeing zombies meant, and only found dreaming about zombies, because I’ve actually googled that dream. All the reasons she said it listed were the same I found. And they all definitely matched up what was going on in her life. As she began to actually notice them at certain times, I kind of realized what she ended up concluding on her own later in the book. Especially when the zombification actually hit her personally.

I loved how the author used the zombies to symbolize certain things with love and feelings and such. In fact in the acknowledgements at the end, the inspiration the author said for this story actually hits close to my own feelings about love and relationships. Even if that’s not the way the story actually panned out in the end. Bo was such a great love interest. Cute, corny, and sweet. I think I fell in love with him a bit myself, maybe even before Zharie realized she was doing the same. Zharie’s Auntie made me angry, even though I knew that she was probably grieving in her own way, and the way she came across to Zharie was how any teen would feel after losing their mother. And her dad, just wow. All the emotions and anger with him, but I loved how Zharie handled that!

And then all of the different art aspects. The way Zharie saw things from van Gogh’s art, as well as the colors and the paintings in her surroundings. One reason that really stood out to me as it was woven through the story is that if she really was a Sumner Academy student, there are some great artists that attend that school, and I could just see one of them and their artwork every time it was described in the story. While I wondered if it was meant to be something she was seeing like the zombies, I also wondered if it was supposed to be a hint that she had some kind of synesthesia.

Such a wonderful debut novel, and I can’t wait to not only promote and share this with my own students at the high school library where I work, but to read more by her in the future!

Review first posted on Lisa Loves Literature.