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Author: Isaac Marion
My Rating: 5 out 5 stars
Synopsis: R 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.
Review:
"She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human."
I am not a fan of zombies and I actually don't understand why other people likes them, but this book did made me fall in love not just with its zombie characters but the whole story with it. Warm Bodies surprised me with it's humorous and amusing POV.
It wasn't that exciting to be honest. I didn't felt the action despite some hunting scenes. It didn't have the usual 'unfolding' as the story goes on. It actually started with the idea about what it's like being dead and the want to be alive.
R was not like the other zombies. Yes, he was hunting and feeding from the Living and acts like the other zombies. But despite he's state, he was actually alive or maybe sort of, but not entirely. He wanted to be alive though. He wanted to remember what it was like before he died.
I can't find the right words to describe what this novel is like or what I felt about it other than this made me want to live and to stay alive. It bleeds life and hope despite what the world is like. The whole story represented our lives with all the challenges in it, and the characters were how we tend to react to the different waves we encounter. Despite understanding where Perry's morbidity comes from, I also get why Julie wants to believe and keep on fighting. I understand R's desire to be alive once again. This novel speaks reality.
Here are some lines I highlighted while reading:
"I'm sorry I can't properly introduce myself, but I don't have a name any more. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries."
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"But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to be the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are."
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"The new hunger is a strange feeling. We don't feel it in our stomachs - some of us don't even have those. We feel it everywhere equally, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating."
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"Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took."
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"I chew off a man's arm, and I hate it. I hate his screams, because I don't like pain, I don't like hurting people, but this is the world now."
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"Breathing is optional, but I need some air."
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"When the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it's hard to get worked up about any one thing."
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"Maybe you're not such a monster, Mr. Zombie. I mean, anyone who appreciates good bear is at least half way okay in my book."
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"Want it...to hurt. But...doesn't."
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"I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses."
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"Music is life! It's physical emotion - you can touch it! It's neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow."
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"He gave up, basically. Quit his life. Real death was just the next logical step."
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"All the shitty stuff people do to themselves...it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself."
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"You think death isn't meaningful?"
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"Can I have both? Can I survive in this doomed world and still love Julie, who dreams above it?"
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"I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect."
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"There's no benchmark for how life's 'supposed' to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how to respond to it."
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"How do we fix everything? It's so broken. Everyone is dying, over and over again, in deeper and darker ways."
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"I don't have the answers she's asking for, but I can feel their existence. Faint point of light in the distant dark."
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"What's the point of trying to fix a world we're in so briefly? What's the meaning in all that work if it's just going to disappear? Without warning?"
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"Are we trying to stay alive because we think the world will get better someday?"
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"I know I didn't deserve her. She offered me everything and I pissed on it. So now it's your turn, R. Go keep her safe. She's a lot softer than she seems."
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"What I'm trying to say is, it's a shitty world and shit happens, but we don't have to bathe in shit."
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"I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some...dark place."
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"We released it. We poked through the seabed and the oil erupted, painted us black, pulled our inner sickness out for everyone to see. Now here we are in this dry corpse of a world, rotting on our feet till there's nothing left but bones and the buzz of flies."
Warm Bodies is a poignant story about life. One that would make you question which side are you standing now and which side do you want to stay.
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This copy was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This did not influence my review in any way.
