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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Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson (review by Mrs. Cranston)

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Robopocalypse (available as an ebook through OverDrive), humans have finally done it. By creating a super-intelligent robot named Archos, we have, in its words, “made mankind obsolete.” In one horrifying moment (Zero Hour), Archos turns our technology against us, using cars, smart-weapons, even cell phones as tools of the robot uprising. Told from alternating perspectives before and after Zero Hour, this fast-paced book describes how a few brave humans resist Archos’ quest to cleanse the world of humanity. Readers who like a little philosophy thrown in with their apocalypse will adore this book. Sure there are be-tentacled super-robots ripping open buildings to extract humans like sardines from a can, but there are also humanoid robots meditating on what it means to be “alive.” Robopocalypse’s oral history structure as well as the scale and pace of its global disaster will draw comparisons to World War Z. However, while World War Z’s protagonists had to outmaneuver zombies (gross yes, but relatively slow and definitely brain-dead), Robopocalypse’s characters must outsmart a vastly superior intelligence whose army is global and instantaneous and in your iPad! In fact, the challenge is so compelling and Archos so daunting that the resolution is a bit unconvincing…still there are more books in the series, so we’ll see what happens next! Overall, a great read. - Mrs. Cranston, Harker librarian

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