Reviewer: Tracy Waking Up Alive by Emma Shortt
Series: End of Days Love #2
Also in this series: Waking Up Dead
Publisher: Entangled
Publication Date: January 18, 2016
Genres: Post Apocalyptic
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Series Rating:
After surviving the zombie apocalypse for two years, Tye LeBow never expected to be saved from a hungry gang of zombies by a geek with a bad attitude and a penchant for explosives. Tye can’t quite work out why scientist Polly Parker saved him. She doesn’t want his protection, and she certainly doesn’t want his company. But Tye has no intention of leaving the beguiling geek behind.
Polly doesn’t want to leave her home, but when the wakers begin to show signs of a burgeoning intelligence, heading south is the only option. With a car packed full of homemade explosives, and Tye’s very large axe, they are ready for the road trip of their lives.
Bombs and blades aren’t the only keys to survival–they’ll need to rely on each other, in a way that neither could have imagined…
Tye has been holding his own in the zombie apocalypse. He met his friend Jackson two years after it began and they’ve stuck together. Unfortunately, they get separated when running from zombies while in Chicago and that’s when Tye meets Polly. Polly is a mathematician and when everything started going to hell a couple of years ago she holed up in her office building and she’s been quite safe. She should have left Chicago a long time ago but fear has kept her in place. She doesn’t want to trust Tye but forces herself to see him as a good person and it manages to work out.
Tye and Polly end up leaving Chicago together to head to the survivors camp that is near Laredo Texas. When they get near to it they end up in a zombie horde and Polly gets bitten by a zombie. The doctor at the camp has been working on a cure to the virus that is causing the zombieism and with Polly’s antibodies he may have done it. That doesn’t make Tye happy that Polly is now a zombie and that he may never get her back.
The story of Tye and Polly was a good one. I think you definitely have to read Jackson and Luke’s story in Waking Up Dead before starting Waking Up Alive. I don’t think you can fully grasp the situation or the thoughts behind the virus or the doctor’s “almost” cure unless you do. The story was good but can’t, imho, be read as a stand-alone novel.
Tye and Polly were a sweet couple together. I really liked the first part of the book when they meet and start to fall in love. You can see it as two friends falling in love and though it happens slowly and in definite stages it was no less touching. Polly and Tye were opposites but meshed well. I liked how Tye helped Polly with her fears and he supported her ideas with respect. He saw her as brave when she didn’t see that in herself.
The second part of the book was a good but a bit disappointing in the romance department. It had Polly as a zombie and we got weird Polly-zombie dreams which were quite strange and Tye going out to kill zombies cuz he couldn’t be with Polly. That was all good and it worked well for the cure but it didn’t really work for enhancing the romance between the two. The end was sweet but didn’t quite make up for the lack of romance in the second half of the book.
Despite my issues with the romance I still thought it was a quite enjoyable read. The descriptions of the zombies was appropriately disgusting and the action scenes were well done. Overall a decent read and one you won’t want to miss especially if you’ve already read Waking Up Alive.
Rating: 3.75 out of 5
Reading Order:
Waking Up Dead
Waking Up Alive
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