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Jun 20, 2011

Wendy Darling rated it:

4.5 out of 5 stars This is a gruesome and beautiful book. This allegorical tale of a 15-year-old girl wandering a barren wasteland should not be beautiful, because she's fighting off zombies and a guy who's dead set on executing her. But it is. The writing is lush and gorgeous, the kind that makes you want to sink down and roll around in it until some small part of it is absorbed into your skin.

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Excerpt:

It was d More...

50 comments like (72 people liked it)

Oct 16, 2011

karen rated it:

book two of "october is zombie month" was so much better than book one. sooo much better.

i was intrigued by this book, until i read mike reynolds' devastatingly negative review of it, and it got shunted to the mental back burner. but eventually i remembered that i am not as smart as mike reynolds, and i am content with playing with little glass paperweights refracting in the sunlight while giggling, so i read it. and i loved it.

(see, pretty!)

bu More...

32 comments like (57 people liked it)

Dec 21, 2011

Lou rated it:

A girl who’s traveled the land, her mind filled with people, sights and words, with sins and redemption. She’s only 15 and has killed many the rule is kill or be killed. A desolate land of death and zombies, she did not choose this destiny. Amongst the contagious spreading of zombies, she hides from many in the shadows and is well equipped to fight twice her size equipped with her gurkha knife. This story is written well, a story so bleak about death and survival and love has some be More...

5 comments like (27 people liked it)

Aug 08, 2011

Tatiana rated it:

I just finished reading probably a couple of dozens of the book's reviews and feel like there is hardly anything left to add. Except maybe that The Reapers Are the Angels is one of the very few zombie books I have ever finished and pretty much the only zombie book that I finished with pleasure and emotional involvement. Most likely because this novel isn't really about zombies. It is about us, people, whose conscience (and not external circumstances) often is our most dangerous and relentless en More...

15 comments like (41 people liked it)

Aug 12, 2011

Lisa O. rated it:

The Reapers are the Angels is one of those books which I find extremely difficult to review because whatever I might say about it, it is never enough and it sounds banal.

Right from page 1, it was clear to me that this book stands in a category of its own in respect to YA lit - but then, can it even be considered YA lit? One sure thing I can say is that this is literature.
In fact, one of the traits which make this book really stand out is certainly the quality of its writing: me More...

15 comments like (20 people liked it)

Nov 05, 2011

Jo rated it:

This is probably going to be the vaguest, wishy-washiest review I’ve written. But I find that it’s imperative not to go into too much detail with this one. If you’ve read it or when you’ve read it, you’ll probably understand why I’m reluctant to go into too much detail. This book asks a lot of questions and doesn’t offer a lot of answers… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Books are supposed to make you think and this one certainly does.
If you do want a crack at some answers Lisa and More...

130 comments like (13 people liked it)

May 26, 2011

Maja rated it:

The harvest is the end of this world,
and the reapers are the angels.

I've read countless books in my life and through them I've been introduced to literally thousands of characters. Some of them I forgot almost instantly. Others I need to be reminded of and even then remember only faintly. Then there are some I remember clearly because a part of them was important to me. But there is also a very small number of characters that stay with me always, characters that follow me aroun More...

21 comments like (35 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2011

Nancy rated it:

I’m glad I read Megan's review, or I might have overlooked this slim but very satisfying post-apocalyptic story.

If you are looking for thrills, mad and ravenous zombies, and intense gore, look elsewhere. You won’t find it here. Not that there isn’t violence or zombies, it’s just that they don’t overpower the story.

Without family or a place to live, 15-year-old Temple wanders around a bleak and barren landscape ravaged by zombies. Many of the human survivors live in gro More...

5 comments like (18 people liked it)

Oct 14, 2011

Trudi rated it:

Alden Bell proves that the literary zombie novel is not an oxymoron. Review to follow.

About zombies, you can say I’m … earnest. I love how they can be so many different things at once – pathetic, sad, savage, terrifying, unrelenting. Zombies are shambling and starving, haunted and lost. They ramble and feed, yet there is a hint, always just a hint, of some long lost memory of who they used to be. Nothing captures that better than the scene from Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead when the More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 28, 2011

Karen rated it:

I almost completely loved this. A talented, literate writer doing a post-apocalyptic zombie novel with plot, action, and a kick-ass 15 year-old girl protagonist. Some really beautiful language, elevating some grotesque zombie business to a kind of Resident-Evil-meets-The-Stand-meets-Cormac-McCarthy-meets-Faulkner. The ending bugged a bit, but that's not much of a quarrel. This is what The Passage should have been, and wasn't.

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Sep 19, 2011

Eddie rated it:

A 3.5 rounded up to a 4-star

I've really been blank for reviews on previous books I've finished and
I'm not sure why. Maybe just the lack of confidence to write one. I've said this before, but I read other peoples' reviews and am blown away on what a wonderful job that most write up. But maybe it's just a matter of practicing, right? So, Eddie, lets not be lazy and take a crack at this one...

OK, this was my first trip down zombie(meatskins, as said in this book) lan More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 14, 2011

Michele rated it:

The Reapers are the Angel is one of those books that people aren't going to expect, and that many otherwise avid horror fans might end up over looking. A gothic southern tale of a girl who lives alone after the zombie uprising it does for zombies what Interview with a Vampire did for vampires.
Temple is barely a teenager, left to survive in a failing world. She's illiterate, had never know family or a world without zombies yet she's searching the world for something she can't put a name to. More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Alicia rated it:

From the beginning this reads like an author trying desperately to write an intelligent and literary young adult book. If only the execution had worked. It read like a clumsy attempt at so-called beautiful writing in that way where you're envisioning the people who write with a Thesaurus open on their lap and change every other word to make their writing something it's not.

The story was weighed down by the purple prose. It was a clunky read, only made worse by the "style" More...

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 15, 2011

drey rated it:

The world has gone to heck in a handbasket, and fifteen-year-old Temple has to leave her pretty little lighthouse because it's not going to be safe for much longer, especially since the meatskins--that's what the zombies are called in this offering from Alden Bell--have managed to get to it. So she takes off to see what else is out there. Other than meatskins, that is...

Then she finds a group of people holed up in a city. A group trying to take things back from the meatskins, and keep More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jun 09, 2011

Isamlq rated it:

Three words:

Gruesome.

Bloody.

Intense. So intense in fact that relief is what I felt with its ending. Well, relief and confusion and anger but yes, most definitely relief.

Temple is fifteen and making her way across a destroyed, zombie-filled America. This destruction is tackled in detail. Everything from where they live, how they live, what they had do to survive is described in detail~ wherein the gruesome nature of the book pops up. This isn’t f More...

1 comment like (12 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2012

Donna rated it:

I have read so many glowing reviews of The Reapers are the Angels that I simply had to see what all the fuss was about and even though I was warned ahead of time about the bloody bits, I still wanted to read this. I decided to listen to this on audio and I think the narrator did an amazing job giving voice to the conflicted and unique character that was Temple. I would certainly recommend this audio to anyone who is planning to read this.

Temple was an intriguing character, so full o More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Nov 12, 2011

rachel rated it:

One of the thoughts that has been cemented pretty firmly in my mind for a while is that despite loving literature of the South, I do not love Cormac McCarthy. I love to hate his snobbery about comma usage and his disdain for flowery writing (which I am sure is code for "women's writing," as it often is with these self-important men). The humorlessness of the author gets superimposed onto his work, extending my annoyance to not only his opinions but his books too.

So as s More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 01, 2011

Anne rated it:

I liked it. It was a gripping read, hard to put down, with a lot of good imagery. I liked the ending, but I would have liked a different ending much better.

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 11, 2011

David rated it:

The post-apocalypse novel is quicksand terrain for many new writers, it's initial allure as a plaything for broad imaginings and contemporary environmental concerns can seduce the naive and indeed the cynical into believing it's an easy place to make a name for oneself.
Alden Bell manoeuvres his writing across touchstones such as William Faulkner and Richard Matheson as opposed to fashionable cinematic styling's or dumbed down schlock novels and his words ring like polished glass in the li More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Aug 10, 2011

Bonnie rated it:

This contains some spoilers and is a bit of an ‘all over the place’ type of review. I had a hard time gathering all of my thoughts into an organized review.

The world that Temple lives in is the only world she’s ever known. She never lived in a world where there weren’t any zombies, a world where everyone was peaceful and didn’t have to wake up and fighting to survive each and every day.

"The world, it treats you kind enough so long as you’re not fightin against it." More...

11 comments like (11 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

Connie rated it:

Really enjoyed the book. Didn't care much for the writing style. When writing dialogue between characters, no punctuation was used. I didn't know if Temple was thinking something or actually saying it at times. It was very distracting. I was surprised to see that this was published by a major publishing house because of that issue. Having said that, this book was completely different then any I've read. Surrounded by death and the hopeless of those around her, Temple views everything as p More...

6 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 23, 2010

Robert rated it:

Alden Bell, The Reapers Are the Angels (Holt, 2010)

Amazon Vine, wonderful folks that they are, provided me with the best book I read last year hands down, China Mieville's The City and the City. And now, they've provided me with another book that has a strong chance of topping 2010's list: Alden Bell's debut novel, The Reapers Are the Angels. (If you're wondering, as I was, about the awkward title, it's a Biblical quote.) Actually, while it's Alden Bell's debut novel, it's not, really. More...

0 comments like (13 people liked it)

Jun 18, 2011

Lady Moorchild rated it:

When I was fifteen, the same age as our protagonist (who calls herself Temple), I visited the deep south for the first time. During my reading, I felt I was following Temple along that Alabaman coast, the white-painted manors with wrought iron fences, the abandoned plantations, the never-ending roads and too-flat landscape, only now ruined and decaying. There is something about scavenging a barren landscape, scouring the remnants of past civilization, and isolated survivalism that is raw and sat More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 23, 2010

David added it

Temple, who estimates her age at around 16, has never known the world before. Before the zombies spread and the world went dark. She is born into that world and still she sees the beauty despite the utter mess of it all. Or maybe she sees the beauty because of it. As her latest home is discovered, Temple goes back into the world where she runs into some hunters who have a sanctuary. One of them, Abraham, has lusty eyes on her and that doesn’t end well leading to his brother, Moses Todd, to More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 05, 2012

Jeff rated it:

Wow. Technically a zombie novel, but sort of not. it's 25 years after the apocalypse and zombies (aka meatskins, slugs, gobblers) walk the earth, but it's more of a roadtrip novel, or a southern gothic revenge tale - with zombies. However, Mr. Bell completely transcends the cliches of these genres and gives us one of the most gorgeously written books I've ever read. Wonderful dialog, wonderful monologues, and our 15-year-old heroine Temple is utterly compelling. Never have I read such horrific a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 21, 2011

Kate rated it:

I re-read the back of this book and wondered why I thought I would like it. It must have come recommended on Amazon in one of those "if you like this, you'll love..." blurbs. I couldn't imagine why I bought it. But I told myself to give it a try, and I began reading and couldn't stop. The first sentence, "God is a slick god" hooked me, and the lyrical writing kept me engaged. The back cover says it's like a Flannery O'Connor novel with zombies, and to some extent the so More...

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Nov 11, 2011

H. Anne rated it:

There are dozens of different zombie stories out now. But not all of them work. The concepts might be interesting, but the story sometimes falls flat. I found Bell's story to be just the opposite. Are there zombies? Sure, they're there, but they'd not the focus. Has civilization collapsed on itself turning mankind back to a more primitive way of living? Yup, that's accounted for. But what I truly liked was how Bell's novel reminded me of The Road. That same kind of haunting bleakness th More...

0 comments like

Nov 09, 2011

Kati rated it:

Vom Schreibstil war ich sehr enttäuscht. Er wirkt distanziert, wie abgehackt. Wörtliche Rede ist nicht gekennzeichnet. Alles fügt sich wie ein Bericht zusammen. Wenn mich die Geschichte hinter Temple nicht so interessiert hätte, wäre das Buch wohl ein Abbruchkandidat gewesen. Aber durchhalten hat sich für mich gelohnt. Stellenweise gab es im Laufe des Romans sogar schöne Sätze, die mich wirklich erreichten. Auch das Ende hat mich berührt.

Die junge Temple wird in eine Welt hineingeboren More...

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Aug 31, 2011

Jim rated it:

The protagonist is fifteen-sixteen, but content-wise it's not a YA novel. If Faulkner were to collaborate with George Romero, it might come out like this. The language is often as beautiful as the action is graphic. It's not for the squeamish.

Zombies are a permanent part of the American landscape, and have been longer than teen-aged Temple has been alive. She accepts them as part of her world, something to avoid or confront as the moment demands, like mosquitoes or the weather. When sh More...

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Aug 23, 2011

Kasandra rated it:

This author owes a clear debt to Stephen King, who is quoted (from Pet Sematary) at the start. That said, this has its own clear voice, and the protagonist is simply fantastic. At times, I felt this a little much for believability/immersion in the story/being able to set aside fictional coincidence and run with it, but the imagery here is great, the dialogue is wonderful, the scenes are sharply drawn for the most part, and there's enough backstory given to get you close to the protagonist, but n More...

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