Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux

Allison Hewitt, along with a few of her colleagues, is trapped in the staff break room at the book shop where she works while the zombie apocalypse takes place outside.  When the first zombies started marching through town, taking a bite out of anything with a pulse, she and her work buddies barricaded themselves in (I don’t think it’s specifically mentioned, but I get the impression that they left the customers to fend for themselves, which shows an admirable level of pragmatism and cold-heartedness) and now leave only to empty the stinking toilet and to forage for food.  Soon they must venture out into the outside world to see what’s left, but do they do it before or after the toilet finally overflows and they run out of teriyaki beef jerky?

I quite liked this book.  It was by no means perfect, but the good definitely outweighed the  not-so-good.

Probably my favourite aspect of the story was Allison herself.  Having an MC who you can really get behind can make up for any number of leaps of logic you might need to make about a plot (and you need to do a few of these in this book).  She is utterly pragmatic and almost sociopathically cold-hearted but I loved that about her.  She has no compunction about killing a zombie, even if it wears the face of a person she used to know.

I enjoy a zombie novel and nothing irritates me more than the female MC going to pieces or getting all sentimental about stuff that doesn’t matter any more.  Sorry love, it’s the end of the world so no, you can’t go back across town to pick up your childhood teddy bear.  If the zombie apocalypse were to really happen, I think a lot of people would react like Allison.  You’d see so much awful stuff that you’d harden up and come to appreciate the benefits of a nice sharp axe.

The plot moves along quite quickly, and although the reader has to make a few leaps of logic here and there and it sticks to the zombie-novel-formula (plenty of encounters with the undead, family members that may or may not be dead, insubstantial rumours of a safe haven, and a road trip across country) the fact that it was written in the style of a blog made it fresh and interesting because you never knew if Allison was going to live or die.

One thing that confused me about this book - and I might be nit-picking here - but at no point in the story do any of the people Allison is knocking around with turn to her and say, ‘Allison, will you put that damn laptop down and give us a hand fighting off the zombie hoards?’  Because over the space of just under two months, she managed to blog an impressive 100k - ish words.  That’s over 1,500 words a day, which would be impressive in normal circumstances, let alone when you’re struggling to find food, when there’s no reliable electricity or internet source and you’re generally dealing with the end of the world.  But yeah, maybe that’s just me being picky.

There is some romance in the book and it’s kind of sweet and doesn’t detract from the main action.  The very, very end of the book explains what happens to humanity after the apocalypse and although the resolution is basically a bottled form of deus ex machine, it’s kind of nice to be able to speculate if not a happily ever after then at least an ever after for the characters who remain.

4 stars