I finally finished reading Warm Bodies a while back because I knew my friend Rose wanted me to go to the movies and see it with her. Our other Friend Jackie joined us, but hadn’t read the book. Since I had put it down at halfway through, I figured I’d suck it up and just finish so I could compare.
GoodReads DescriptionR is a young man with an existential crisis--he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, no identity, and no pulse. Just dreams.
After experiencing a teenage boy's memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and strangely sweet relationship with the victim's human girlfriend. Julie is a burst of vibrant color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that R lives in. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.
Scary, funny, and surprisingly poignant, Warm Bodies is about being alive, being dead and the blurry line in between.
I’m glad I did, but take that the wrong way The ending did not change my mind about how I felt, in fact I disliked it even more, but I’ll get that.
Warm Bodies, oh how I wanted to love you. There was a little hype I think. I saw reputable Authors and Bloggers raving about it. I thought it was a sure bet that I’d love this book. Nope. It didn’t do it for me.
There were parts that I felt were brilliant. I loved the beginning, the whole telling from R’s point of view. I thought that was really neat. It’s not very often, (pretty much never) that you get to read from the Zombies point of view. I also loved that he was holding on to a sliver of his humanity. It was almost believable. And then the plot thickens, and you get a glimpse into all the Zombies existences, and I thought..... WTNSLF!!!!????!!!!! That stands for…
What the not so living Fuck!
I will say it was different. A little crude at times and strange, but different.
The Romance! Let’s talk about that. That’s weird. I’m a firm believer that you kill zombies, you don’t fall in love with them. Or vice versa in my opinion. R and Julie’s romance is dumb. There, I said it!! DUMB!!! Here is the thing, and this is no spoiler. R eats Julie’s boyfriend (Perry) and eats his brains. Apparently in Warm Bodies, when a Zombie eats a person’s brains, they gain that person’s memories. Or at least get flashes of them. Which is kinda awesome I will admit. I really liked that part, a different take on why Zombies love brains so much. Here I just thought they tasted good. Well, back to R. So he eats Perry’s brains and gets flashes of his relationship with Julie. So now R is kinda obsessed with her. Takes her back to his Zombie infested Airport home.
Their relationship develops, but not in the way I was scared of. lol. No necrophilia sex capades going on, but still, the whole way R’s feelings come about bother me. Because I couldn’t get passed the fact that they weren’t his feelings. They were Perry’s and as he takes little nibbles of the brain he saves in his pocket, his feelings seem to grow.
Still this isn’t want made me put it down. At some point the flashes of memory turn more into Perry being in his head talking to him, and it just crossed over into "too weird". All the other strange shit added to that, and I was done.
I still don’t want to spoil, so I won’t say what they talk about in his head, but overall this book started out great for me, and then just went down the drain. Oh and the ending, I won’t spoil, I promise, but I literally laughed and rolled my eyes.
I still don’t want to spoil, so I won’t say what they talk about in his head, but overall this book started out great for me, and then just went down the drain. Oh and the ending, I won’t spoil, I promise, but I literally laughed and rolled my eyes.
For those of you who have no desire to read this or you have read it… I break out my spoilers in this post where I compare Book to Movie ----> Click Me!
Don’t let my review discourage you though, a lot of people really loved Warm Bodies. I might just be broken.
You're not broken. It was a little off-handed...I didn't think it was going to be everyone's kind of book. "I’m a firm believer that you kill zombies, you don’t fall in love with them." Funny thing, there's another "zombie" series that I'm in the middle of where the zombies kinda sorta act a little bit human. Sex and all. It's weird. But I think it's going to turn out to be that the way they were made into zombies -- maybe not dead and come back to life but some kind of virus or medical testing instead -- might be the reason for this. So, it wouldn't really be necrophilia. :)
ReplyDeleteUgh, ugh, ugh. I hate zombies, and I hate that he's carrying around pieces of brain.
ReplyDeleteThe only zombie book I like is Dearly, Departed. But I don't think those were real zombies, they had a virus.
Totally going over to the movie post.
Oh no! I just loved this one to pieces! I thought it was fun - not like a super gory zombie book like John Maberry writes, but just fun. But I read it when it first came out ages ago and we just grabbed it again yesterday for a re-read so we can *hopefully* see the movie this weekend. I'm not gonna read your movie review at this point because I know the movie is different (which I'm nervous about because I loved the book so much). It LOOKS like the made the movie look very young adult where the book is not YA, so I'm not sure about all of that. But I hate that this one didn' work out for ya. It's true that it is different, but I think that's what made it charming for me.
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