World War Z by Max Brooks (review by Mrs. Cranston)

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book (available as an ebook through OverDrive!) will obsess you, so don’t read it when you have anything else important going on, like Finals… or breakfast. What would happen if zombies were real? How would world governments respond? Would they save us? Evacuate us? Lie to us? Kill us? How would people respond? Would we protect each another? Would we survive? World War Z is told as “an oral history of the Zombie War,” but really, it’s about people. Whereas the movie World War Z follows one character (portrayed by Brad Pitt) through the outbreak and rapid spread of the global zombie virus, the book takes place after the fact (12 years after the end of the war). Written as a series of interviews with survivors of the War. Each chapter is from a different person’s perspective on different stages of the Zombie outbreak, from a Chinese village doctor to an American profiteer selling fake anti-zombie pills. The temporal shift in the telling means that you know these people survived the War, so the book is engrossing without being unimaginably stressful (a plus if you’re not always a horror fan). World War Z is a must-read, especially for fans of dystopian disaster books like Daniel Wilson's Robopocalypse, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Justin Cronin's The Passage. - Mrs. Cranston, Harker librarian

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