Mira Grant: Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (2014, Orbit)
English language
Published May 11, 2014 by Orbit.
I read this when it was new, and I had a child in preschool. It was very good. And I never, ever want to read it again.
It's about a zombie outbreak in an elementary school, a cascading failure of one preventative measure after another, and how one teacher manages to get some of her students out alive.
Grabs you by the throat and won't let go.
Elaine – Miss Oldenburg to her 6yo students – takes her job seriously. Very seriously. As a grade one teacher in the post-pandemic Newsflesh world, that job is quite different to what readers of our world would expect. And it's probably even further removed from what readers in 2014 would have recognised. Elaine is exceptionally good at her job. So when it all goes horribly wrong, no one could possibly blame her … could they?
Unfortunately, for me, there was frustrating technical issues with this one. For one thing, the leading was so tight that I had trouble (physically, I mean) keeping my eyes on the correct line. That slowed my reading down significantly. Secondly, although the text is clearly delineated into chapters, the ebook consists of one giant chapter from start to finish.
I don't blame the author for these …
Grabs you by the throat and won't let go.
Elaine – Miss Oldenburg to her 6yo students – takes her job seriously. Very seriously. As a grade one teacher in the post-pandemic Newsflesh world, that job is quite different to what readers of our world would expect. And it's probably even further removed from what readers in 2014 would have recognised. Elaine is exceptionally good at her job. So when it all goes horribly wrong, no one could possibly blame her … could they?
Unfortunately, for me, there was frustrating technical issues with this one. For one thing, the leading was so tight that I had trouble (physically, I mean) keeping my eyes on the correct line. That slowed my reading down significantly. Secondly, although the text is clearly delineated into chapters, the ebook consists of one giant chapter from start to finish.
I don't blame the author for these flaws, so I haven't deducted any points. I blame the publisher. This is sloppy, haphazard work on their part. Trad pub continues to charge readers almost as much for an ebook as for a paperback without any justification. To do so and then make such a slipshod job of formatting the ebook is unforgivable.
