Early 5 bat! Review: Aftertime by Sophie Littlefield

*This title will be released on February 15, 2011*

Title: Aftertime Author: Sophie Littlefield Series: Aftertime #1 Cover Art: N/A Genre: Urban Fantasy Excerpt: Yes Source: Publisher Reviewed by: Abigail Paperback: 384 pages Publisher: Luna; Original edition (February 15, 2011) ISBN-10: 0373803362 ISBN-13: 978-0373803361 Sexual Content: A couple sex scenes Rating: Near Perfect - Buy two copies: one for you and one for a friend.

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Description

The world’s gone.
Worse, so is her daughter.

Awakening in a bleak landscape as scarred as her body, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Having no idea how many days—or weeks—have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: Ruthie has vanished.

And with her, nearly all of civilization. Where once-lush hills carried cars and commerce, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters—people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong.

In a broken, barren California, Cass will undergo a harrowing quest to get her Ruthie back. Few people trust an outsider, let alone a woman who became a zombie and somehow turned back, but she finds help from an enigmatic outlaw, Smoke. Smoke is her savior, and her safety. For the Beaters are out there. And the humans grip at survival with their trigger fingers. Especially when they learn that she and Ruthie have become the most feared, and desired, of weapons in a brave new world....

Review

I’m unabashedly obsessed with the new AMC show The Walking Dead about the zombie apocalypse and the few remaining human’s struggle for survival.  It’s shocking, and heartbreaking, and so beyond words awesome that my love for zombies has reached an all new high.  I can’t get enough.  Which is why I’m geeking out of my mind after reading AFTERTIME because I felt almost the same way reading it as I do watching The Walking Dead: Captivated.

The story follows Cass, a young mother and recovering addict, as she searches desperately for her daughter mere months after the mysterious infection set in and turned most of the population into ravenous, cannibalistic zombies.  Her only companion is a reclusive man known simply as Smoke.  He agrees for his own reasons to help Cass and together they brave a world that is barely recognizable anymore.  Zombies carry off children to feast on in their nests, power hungry men seize what little society is left and begin Rebuilding it to suit themselves, cults thrive, oblivion is sought after by anyone sane enough to know what’s happening on the streets each night.  The horror is unimaginable.

This is the world the Cass wakes up in.  Alone and nearly skinned. Desperate to find her daughter, terrified of what she can’t remember, and fiercely determined to survive.  She’s like Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Downside Ghost’s Chess Putnam rolled into one.  A deeply damaged woman with a seedy drug and alcohol hazed past full of dark alleys and strange beds.  She’s clawed her way out of addiction and has only one care in the world: her daughter. 

The story is epic in scope.  We get a real sense of the entire world ending and waking up to a nightmarish reality that few could have imagined. We never leave the POV of Cass, yet the people she encounters, both friend and foe, add their own piece to the Aftertime world. The dialogue in the first half of the book is understandably scant, but the story itself is startling and unputdownable from beginning to end.


AFTERTIME is hands down the best zombie book I’ve read all year.  Hide your wife, hide your kids, and hide your husbands ‘cause they eating everybody out here.  Seriously.  No word on the sequel yet, but AFTERTIME is the start of a planned series.  So please go buy this book when you can.  I  have to know what happens next.

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