Alice in Zombieland (White Rabbit Chronicles #1) by Gena Showalter

Book Blurb :

She won’t rest until she’s sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever.

Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that’s all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone.

Her father was right. The monsters are real….

To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn’t careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies….

I wish I could go back and do a thousand things differently.
I’d tell my sister no.
I’d never beg my mother to talk to my dad.
I’d zip my lips and swallow those hateful words.
Or, barring all of that, I’d hug my sister, my mom and my dad one last time.
I’d tell them I love them.
I wish… Yeah, I wish.

Tash M

Review:

Alice in Zombieland wasn’t what I expected in that the closest it comes to be anything related to Alice in Wonderland is the white rabbit clouds and that the heroine is name Alice. I know many people were expecting it to be an homage to Alice in Wonderland and I have seen reviews lamenting on this and that the reviewers were disappointed. With me it’s the only thing I disliked, like others, I was hoping for Lewis Carroll revisionism considering that there has been a trend towards revisioning the classics with a paranormal twist but this book doesn’t take that route.

Alice Bell, since as long as she can remember, has been told never to go out after dark. Her dad says there are monsters out there and they can kill you. Always the obedient daughter, she never tried hard to persuade her mom to convince her dad to go out after dark. But when her younger sister Em asks her to out after dark on her birthday she agrees and successfully pushes her family out into the dark to see Em perform. Which results in her life changing in a heartbeat.

Waking up in the hospital, she now sees the monsters and doesn’t know what to do except take revenge on these monsters. Moving in with her grandparents and starting over in a new school, she starts to discover there is a whole different world lurking just under the surface and she’s not alone in her quest.

The first time in her life Alice is not restrained is when she wakes up and meets Kat who happens to be visiting her mom at work. Kat sees Alice as a lost soul and soon takes Ali (aka Alice) under her wing in the few minutes she’s there. But Alice has bigger problems to deal with and is dwelling in self- pity over her family and spends the summer like this.

The focus of the story is during the school year where Alice discovers people like her. Kat, who hasn’t forgotten her, sees her on the first day of school and gives her a tour of the school and advice on the cliques. There’s one particular clique capturing her attention—Cole and his gang who are considered the bad boys and girls of the school. Kat dated one of the guys last year and warns Ali to stay away from them as she lost her three friends and she believes Frosty cheated on her with Trina. Cole is supposedly dating Madison who Alice starts to hate as she is getting vivid flashes of her own moments of togetherness whenever she sees Cole. Could this be in their future?

Then when a zombie comes out to play, she discover that Coles seems to have a deep secret that could help her and she is soon drawn to his side and his friendship as it seems that they can help each other. But with Kat and her friend’s growing suspicion about Alice and Cole, they need to make a decision that will affect their friendships with their respective cliques. And with Justin showing an interest in her too and Cole refusing to reveal why he hates the guy, Alice might be wishing that she never went out after dark in the first place.

I don’t why but when I was a teenager I never got into YA books. I was more likely to have my nose stuck in a romance or a good mystery. So Alice in Zombieland appealed to me when it came up in the author’s latest offering as I love paranormal stories. Slow to start but when it gets going it’s a fast paced book filled with love, romance, mystery and suspense that will leave you satisfied mostly until near the end. It’s not abrupt but the ending could have been drawn out better, as when we see the groups of friends visiting Alice.

I don’t know what to make of Cole and his boys at this point of this series. In fact we really only get to know Cole, Madison and Frosty out of the entire gang. The others who are part of the gang and Kat herself only get referred to and there’s little information revealed about them. The adults who help the teens throughout the book are deemed more important when the book is supposed to be revolving around Alice and Cole. I‘m hoping as the series goes on we discover more about the guys and girls as they are the core of the team before Alice arrived and they discovered new things about what lurks in the dark.

4 couples

Publisher : Harlequin Teen

Source : Publicist Provided for Review

Released : September 25th 2012

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