Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin) by Jonathan Maberry
| Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin) by Jonathan Maberry | |
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| Category: Teens | |
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Reviewer: Jill Murphy
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| Summary: Further zombie adventures in this wonderful series blending revenge Western with horror. What seems to start as a simple group gets separated and eventually reunites episode turns out to be significantly more complicated. As ever, great stuff. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 480 | Date: October 2012 |
| Publisher: Simon & Schuster | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 0857079719 | |
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Having escaped the horrors of Gameland at the dreadful cost of losing Tom, Benny, Nix, Lilah and Chong must journey through the Rot & Ruin without his warrior smarts. They're in search of the jet they saw in the sky months ago. They hope to find hope, some remains of a civilisation lost after First Night, when the zombie virus spread through the population like wildfire. When life as it was ceased to be. When the undead started to walk...
This is book three in the Rot & Ruin sequence and we are getting to the tricky part of any series now - we know the set-up, we know the characters, we've even suffered the death of a favourite. But we're not ready for resolution. So, how do things move on? I was expecting Benny and Nix's journey to be one-directional and this episode begins with their group getting split up. Oh, I thought. Boring. Holding episode in which the characters get separated, eventually find their way back together again, and then the original journey goes on. Every series has one but I'm a little bit disappointed because I was hoping that Rot & Ruin wouldn't.
Well, hooray! Because it doesn't.
Flesh & Bone is quite a sneaky instalment in one of my favourite dystopian series. Yes, everyone does get separated. And yes, they do find one another again, but not quite in the way you'd expect - trying to avoid spoilers! - and the journey turns out to be a more complicated one than you were expecting. You find that the Ruin holds more dangers than you had realised, from death cults to mutated wild animals. It's not just zombies and bounty hunters out there, dontchaknow. You see that danger lurks not only ahead but also behind. And, even as you grow fonder of the characters you're following, you realise their chances of a happy ending are growing more remote by the chapter.
And yet, you can't help but hope.
I do love this series. I love the way it keeps me reading and combines the familiar with the surprising. In Flesh & Bone, I particularly loved the way my expectations were reset and the way in which Tom (my favourite, even if he is dead) hasn't completely disappeared from the pages. I've got everything crossed for eventual redemption for Benny and Nix, their friends, and the world in which they find themselves.
We also have a review of Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry.
Fans of zombie action will love Feed by Mira Grant. I like the very different treatment given to the undead in Generation Dead by Daniel Waters.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin) by Jonathan Maberry at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin) by Jonathan Maberry at Amazon.com.
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