The Kiss of Life Review

The Kiss of Life

By Daniel Waters

Trade Paperback, 416 pages

List Price: $17.99

Product Details
Simon & Schuster UK, September 2009
Trade Paperback, 416 pages
ISBN-10: 1847383971
ISBN-13: 9781847383976

Description

When Phoebe's best friend Adam takes a bullet for her, it proves everyone right - Adam is in love with her. And now that he's come back to life, Phoebe's presence may be more important than ever. They say that a zombie can come back from death faster if they're loved... and kissed - which means Phoebe has to say goodbye to Tommy Williams, the other zombie in her life. While coaxing Adam back to reality and fending off Tommy's advances, Phoebe continues to carry on as if everything's normal. But normal has been different since American teenagers started rising from their graves. Although some try to bridge the gap between the living and the differently biotic, there are scores of people who want nothing more than to send all of the undead back to their graves. And the dead kids in Phoebe's school don't like that one bit...

Review

After reading the third book first, I’ve gone back and read the second book in this series and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has been a real back the front system for this series for me, but when you read the last book in a trilogy first and like it, you have no choice but to read the 1st and 2nd.

Teenagers in America are continuing to rise from the dead and return to a semblance of life. Not everyone returns as a zombie and not everyone is happy about all the people that do return as zombies.

At the end of Generation Dead, Adam took a bullet to save Phoebe's life. Luckily, in Water’s version of America, a fair amount of people who die come back as zombies, but not everyone is happy about that. So we see the return of Adam in the second book, but without most of his regular functions. He can barely walk, talk, or do anything without the help of somebody. He downright luck that his family has taken him in.

Two plot threads tangle together in this installment- the love triangle from the first book between Adam, Phoebe, and Tommy continues, and the zombie rights movement heats up as a group of local zombies clashes with those who oppose them.

Tommy leaves on a journey to Washington, DC, advocating for his people. While he is gone, things heat up back home as Tak, the somewhat menacing "old-school" zombie, leads a growing group of dissenters, into pranks designed to force the "trads" to recognize their existence.

Meanwhile, some a group of renegade zombies has decided that they need to take action against the crimes that are being committed against zombies all over the nation. Most of their actions are just stupid pranks but when things go wrong and people start going missing, the zombies are always the first to blame. And there group has only made them seem more like the guilty party.

Water’s series is an original take on the zombie culture and interesting with an insight into an alternative nature of the zombies' thoughts and feelings, along with showing the continuing discrimination against them. These are definitely not the flesh-eating zombies of the past, but a new kind, one that only wants to live in peace with the living.

If you are a fan, there is even a blog of one of the characters, Tommy, at mysocalledundeath.com