Passing Strange by Daniel Waters (REVIEW)

Karen DeSonne is used to pretending to be something she’s not. All her life, she’s passed as a normal all-American teenager; with her friends, with her family, and at school. Passing cost her the love of her life. And now that Karen’s dead, she’s still passing this time, as alive.

Meanwhile, Karen’s dead friends have been fingered in a high-profile murder, causing a new round of anti-zombie regulations that have forced nearly all of Oakvale’s undead into hiding. Karen soon learns that the “murder” was a hoax, staged by Pete Martinsburg and his bioist zealots. Obtaining enough evidence to expose the fraud and prove her friends’ innocence means doing the unthinkable: betraying her love by becoming Pete’s girlfriend. Karen’s only hope is that the enemy never realizes who she really is because the consequences would be even worse than death.

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MY THOUGHTS:

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. The first two installments in the series was Okay, but this book really disappointed me.

Karen has always been one of my favorite characters. She's cute and fun and I always suspected that she had a thing for girls. When I discovered that this book would mostly be from her point of view, I was all like "Okay, I'm on board! Let's mix it up a little!" But as I began to read, I literally felt my eyelids closing. It took me nearly two hundred pages to even get interested, and after that I didn't hang on very long. There were several times when I shoved the book to the side and started reading another.

This book also focuses on Tak (one of the creepy zombies) and Pete (a psychopathic zombie killer person). Karen has to date Pete in order to get to the bottom of the charges that were pressed against the zombies in the previous book. I expected it to be sort of suspenseful and really make me feel the repulsion of having to date the enemy. Instead, there was absolutely no suspense whatsoever. Throughout the entire book it flips perspectives from Karen to Pete to Tak. With all three of those combined there was really little mystery left in the plot.

I found myself really missing Adam and Pheobe, because now that they're together and Adam is breaking all sorts of zombie laws, I wanted to see more of their story. But they are only really mentioned in passing.

A lot of the characters felt very flat to me in this story. Tak and Pete especially. I mean, we understand why Pete hates all of zombiekind and why he's going off and trying to eliminate them all. It just feels kind of pushed for me. "Oh, my girlfriend didn't come back so you guys are all evil." That doesn't even make sense to me. I feel like his motives were more crazy than justified.

Now, onto The reasons I liked it:

• The premise. I think the whole "trying to get zombies to fit in with society" idea is kind of nifty. I like that they're not "AHHHH BRAINS!" because, quite frankly, that kind of thing kind of makes me scared to go to sleep. I also like, in this book, the idea of a lesbian zombie. It's just unique.

My rating:

2 out of 5 stars.