World War Z by: Max Brooks

Continuing on in the adventure of exploring new authors…Here’s where I’m at:

Zombie novels are lame… at least that is what I believed until I read World War Z by Max Brooks.  I thought World War Z was going to be another one of those zombie stories where a group of people find a bunch of guns, kill a lot of zombies, and end up dying in the end.  My prediction was far off.

The first surprise was the setup of this book.  Instead of having a story that follows one or a few protagonists, this book is composed of a series of fictional interviews.  The second surprise was that instead of writing a story, the author decided to create a world through a vast amount of perspectives caused by the interviews with the different.  And the third surprise was that the novel focused much more on society, governance, military strategy, and human nature than it did on physical combat against zombies.  The fourth surprise  for me was how knowledgeable the author was: he knew so much information – societal, scientific, and political – it was amazing how accurate it made everything.

Basically, there has been a zombie virus which led to the most devastating war in human history. A reporter decides to go around the war interviewing people involved in various stages, or important events of this zombie apocalypse.  There are dozens of interviews ranging from average civilians to government officials.  This allows the novel to be open ended instead of having the author dictate what’s is right or wrong (like in normal novels).

All of these aspects create a genius novel that is extremely realistic and un-put-down-able.  It deals with about every theme there is, and explores how society deals when faced with such a huge threat.  I think I’ll have to remove a book from my  top ten list of youth novels to make room for this one.  I recommend this to all readers 14 and up.  This novel is definately a 5/5 .