This story is an excellent example of the zombie genre – it covers the first 5 days following a zombie outbreak in St. Louis, Liv and her baby Ellie are caught in traffic on a bridge when the danger reaches them and Liv has to do whatever it takes to get them to safety.
This book is about the human aspect of the zompocalypse, rather than the scientific or military sides. It considers how ordinary people would react to this situation and how messed up things would get within less than a week (pretty damn messed up, as it happens). It’s the race for survival that gets you hooked, the fear and uncertainty is tangible. Their journey has a few parts to it as they hold up in different abandoned houses along the way and meet other survivors, making it easy to break this audio up into series if you want to listen to it in smaller chunks.
I feel that the fear factor would have been amped up by using the baby as a character a little more, there were long stretches of time without any mentions of her at all when she could have contributed to the feeling of danger. This is an action-driven novel, with moderate gore and a load of loss and violence. It surprised me how quickly characters adapted to sprinting for long distances and taking mallets to the heads of the infected.
The TJ Richards’ strength is voicing the characters, she pulled off a variety of accents and gave them all distinct voices that I really enjoyed. She added to the atmosphere of desperation surrounding the survivors and made this a great audiobook to listen to.
Audiobook was provided for review by the author.
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