Reviews seem to go back and forth on whether or not this is actually a YA novel, so I thought I'd give this a shot despite not being a fan of YA in the slightest. Now that I'm finished, I'm going to vote that it might as well be. Outsider badass girl protagonist? Try-hard purple prose? I'm sure I would've loved this as a teenager.

To be fair, the first few chapters pulled me in. I wanted to like this, really. I've yet to find a good post-apocalyptic novel with good female characters. This book promised that, plus a change from the typical urban setting. Unfortunately, there are a few issues:

(view spoiler)[
- I was willing to suspend my disbelief up to a point. The barren but conveniently stocked setting is fine for the first part since I'm more interested in Temple's characterization. I'm willing to overlook how implausible it is for a survivor commune to still have a stock of prescription drugs in exchange for the scene of the band of men playing poker with pills. It was interesting and dramatic. I'll even forgive the mysteriously fully-stocked gas stations and running power twenty years after the outbreak of zombies. But a meth lab mutant cult? Really? Fucking zombies weren't enough--we need malformed swamp creatures too? And other inexplicable things included merely to make the story more dramatic or "cinematic" (a TV tuned to static that even the protagonist acknowledges should've burnt out years ago, a mansion filled with snooty rich people who somehow have sustained their ritzy lifestyle decades later, etc.), it's just too much.

- Cormac McCarthy you are not. Use quotation marks. Actually, don't bother, since your protagonist and narrator speak in the same voice anyway. How else is a fifteen-year-old hillbilly randomly throwing fancy pants thesaurus words into her twangy "WELL KISS MAH GRITS" Southern vocab?

- Allegory and imagery about as subtle as a boulder to the head. Writing just about as clunky as said boulder. Having the protagonist and antagonist sit down to have friendly philosophical discussions about God's plan is lame. (Summary: "Why must you kill me?" "It's my fate!" "I know." Again, Cormac McCarthy you are not.) I had to stop and reread several paragraphs--not because I was relishing the "deep" writing, but because they made no sense. (hide spoiler)]

I know I'm tearing into this book more than it deserves, probably. It was just so disappointing after how much I enjoyed the opening chapters.