Book Review: Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Book: Generation Dead
Author: Daniel Waters
Published: 2008

The teenage years are a time of change. All of a sudden, for teenagers in America, those changes include going from life to death . . . and then back again. They're not hungry for brains, nor are they rotting away. They're just kids who want to live their undeaths.

American society is in a tizzy. From hucksters selling Zombie Power t-shirts to well-meaning foundations that insist on such terms as "differently biotic" to televangelists predicting the imminent apocalypse, they're all trying to fit the living dead into their lives, and to understand what it means for them.

For Phoebe, the zombie kids hold a certain fascination. She's played at death as a goth girl for so long that the existence of kids who really can tell you what it's like is both unsettling and exciting. Her best guy friend, Adam, isn't so sure. But when a charismatic and idealistic zombie boy, Tommy Williams, joins the football team and starts pursuing Phoebe, both of them have to decide where they stand.

As if the teenage years weren't confusing enough.

I wasn't expecting to like this book, at least not as much as I did. I'd heard good things about it from bloggers I trust, so I thought, "Okay, I'll put it on my list. I'll probably read it, enjoy it, and pass it on to the supernatural-loving teens at my library, and that'll be the end of it."

I fell a little bit in love with Adam (c'mon! Seriously, could you resist this guy?), I growled over the blatant prejudice suffered by the living dead kids, I held my breath to see if Phoebe was going to wake up and smell the hunk. (Short answer: not yet.)

I never really warmed up to Tommy, and I never got the feeling that Phoebe did either. While the jacket flaps insist that theirs is a doomed, Twilight-esque romance, it's more like curiosity and a certain attraction to his political ideals. Also, for a book that includes pitch-perfect civil-rights conflicts, there was a certain lack of actual gay, lesbian, or minority characters. (Okay, there was a black zombie and an Asian one. But that was about it.)

But I enjoyed the hell out of this book, and the sequel, Kiss of Life, is totally on my list.