xiontawa's review against another edition
4.0
3.75 stars. I liked it, but not as well as the first 4.
psykobilliethekid's review against another edition
5.0
I hate it when life gets in the way of a good book! Finally finished this one! After reading the author's note at the end, it explained why this one felt a little different than the previous ones. Still good and highly recommended, but it was just slightly not as good as the previous titles.
Still looking forward to the next one if there is a next one! :)
Still looking forward to the next one if there is a next one! :)
jellybean_gene's review against another edition
5.0
Love that it's still bringing in new characters and unexpected plots five books in. Great set of books
mkaber's review against another edition
5.0
How does he do it? How are each of these books more interesting and imaginative than the last?! Alas, I am now at a point where I have to wait for the next book. Sigh.
ewreck82's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
trike's review against another edition
3.0
I'm torn with this one. Half of it is really good and half of it is really bad. Like, two different drafts smushed together good/bad, and the dichotomy jumps out at you all the time.
It's superheroes v. zombies, and Clines is playing with the tropes of both of those genres (and the character of Zzzap borders on being aware he's in a genre book which, I'm begging you, Peter, do not go there), and playing the various tropes off one another has long been a strong suit of this series, but they feel undeveloped here.
The plot is pretty basic: Zzzap sees a bunch of ships lashed together in the middle of the Pacific, so St. George decides they should go see if they need help. Inexplicably, he wants to take Corpse Girl with them. (The rationale is that she needs to get out and about because teenager. Or something.) Meanwhile, they need to expand their food production because their crops burned up in a wildfire that kicks off the book.
Right here I had a problem with the story, because if your group of thousands of survivors is suddenly faced with starvation, you don't go looking for others. Why would your Superman equivalent and the guy who can generate power leave at such a critical juncture? You don't have excess supplies to offer these other survivors and you can't bring them here, so you're going 2,000 miles away from where you're needed to say, "Hey, 'sup?" It's not like a bunch of castaways on floating ships is going to have anything to offer you.
I'm going to hide the rest of this long review behind a spoiler tag, but suffice it to say that the problems I had with this installment were balanced out by the parts I throughly enjoyed.
Monday-morning quarterbacking, I would have had the Mount in a superb position, enabling St. George and Zzzap a window of relative calm to expand their city or offer help to others, and then have everything go sideways in their absence, forcing the others to step up to the challenge of not having their two most powerful superheroes to depend on.
Because that's essentially what happens anyway. As the Mount tries to expand their adjunct garden (called Eden), in-fighting and bickering and old-fashioned distrust threaten to divide the community, and then, because it's the zombie apocalypse, shit hits the fan. But within the Mount you have superheroes, you have former gang members, you have the remnants of an elite military unit, plus regular folks, all of them with different needs and expectations, so naturally you're going to get conflict. And in a time of plenty, people become petty, because the stakes aren't as high and they have energy to act like The Real Housewives of the Apocalypse.
All of which happens, but it's under the duress of their food supply going up in flames. I just couldn't buy into that aspect of it, mostly because I wasn't sold that these people were starting to feel desperate. It just sort of felt like conflict for conflict's sake.
Which is the other issue I had with the titular "ex-isle" part of the book. The floating ship island, Lemuria, which Zzap refers to as "Waterworld except believable" (stay away from the fourth wall, I'm pleading with you), is run by a superpowered guy named Maleko, who transforms into Nautilus, who is reminiscent of DC's King Shark (a giant sharkman character featured in an episode of season 2 of The Flash). Problem being, Nautilus is really a supervillain pretending to be a superhero, so he does things which supervillains do because he's a supervillain. There's no nuance to this guy. Shark = bad, the end.
It does lead to two of the coolest scenes in the book, however. One where Zzzap and St. George are held prisoner while being manacled to children with the threat of other kids being drowned should they attempt to escape. Zzzap can't transform from his paraplegic self into his energy form without killing the kid, and superstrong George can't break out without the other kids drowning. The only way to constrain characters this powerful is by leashing them with their conscience. The second cool scene is where Corpse Girl is torn in two by Nautilus and she has to pull herself back together. The problem being that she has trouble forming permanent memories, so each time she wakes up she goes through the shock of discovering her condition all over again.
But why can't people on the ships see what a supervillain Nautilus is? Some do, but most go along with using their children as human shields. I didn't buy into that at all.
I really liked the parts in Eden where the creator and pilot of the mecha suit Cerberus, Danielle, has to confront her PTSD and reasonable agoraphobia. She's seen some heavy shit and she lives surrounded by millions of zombies. Of course she's messed up. I'm surprised more people aren't, really. But her overcoming of those issues is a standout part of the story and is really, really good.
However, what happened to Stealth? She's the Batman of this world who is always two steps ahead of everyone else and has contingency plans for her contingency plans, yet she is reduced to a cameo appearance. Seems like she'd have a backup plan for a catastrophe at Eden. Seems like she'd also talk her boyfriend St. George from flying out to the middle of the ocean when he could be better utilized at home in the midst of their crisis.
Perplexingly, there's a scene from the past featuring Gorgon, a character I only vaguely recall from previous books in the series, and it has no relevance whatsoever. He shows up and then never reappears, almost like he was in an earlier draft and Clines forgot to delete that chapter. It's also weird because there's a nearly identical flashback featuring St. George which covers almost the exact same material, and it shows him leaving a bitten, about-to-turn father on a roof outside the Mount so his daughter and wife don't have to see him become a zombie and then get shot in the head, and it turns out that's the zombie guy who shows up in Eden and is instrumental in Danielle's PTSD scenes.
George and Zzzap don't kill Nautilus after defeating him and foiling his plan to nuke Los Angeles, which was bizarre to me. Maybe it's supposed to be a parallel with the story of Zombie Dad and how killing someone might keep them from their destiny that ultimately leads to something good or whatever, but it's pretty well buried in there and that's sort of muddled thinking, even for a fantasy such as this.
Like I said up top, parts are really good and parts are pretty bad. Strange.
Also strange is the fact that Clines has an afterward explaining how this book was rushed and he used an outline, which he hates to do. I doubt I would be able to tell either of those things from what I read here, but the story does feel poorly thought-out, which is not something I've really noticed about the other books in this series. I kind of suspect he was fighting both the deadline and the uncomfortable constraints of outlining which caused him to be not as thoughtful about the plot or characters this time. Less focus on the bad things and more focus on the structure would help in the future.
It's superheroes v. zombies, and Clines is playing with the tropes of both of those genres (and the character of Zzzap borders on being aware he's in a genre book which, I'm begging you, Peter, do not go there), and playing the various tropes off one another has long been a strong suit of this series, but they feel undeveloped here.
The plot is pretty basic: Zzzap sees a bunch of ships lashed together in the middle of the Pacific, so St. George decides they should go see if they need help. Inexplicably, he wants to take Corpse Girl with them. (The rationale is that she needs to get out and about because teenager. Or something.) Meanwhile, they need to expand their food production because their crops burned up in a wildfire that kicks off the book.
Right here I had a problem with the story, because if your group of thousands of survivors is suddenly faced with starvation, you don't go looking for others. Why would your Superman equivalent and the guy who can generate power leave at such a critical juncture? You don't have excess supplies to offer these other survivors and you can't bring them here, so you're going 2,000 miles away from where you're needed to say, "Hey, 'sup?" It's not like a bunch of castaways on floating ships is going to have anything to offer you.
I'm going to hide the rest of this long review behind a spoiler tag, but suffice it to say that the problems I had with this installment were balanced out by the parts I throughly enjoyed.
Spoiler
Monday-morning quarterbacking, I would have had the Mount in a superb position, enabling St. George and Zzzap a window of relative calm to expand their city or offer help to others, and then have everything go sideways in their absence, forcing the others to step up to the challenge of not having their two most powerful superheroes to depend on.
Because that's essentially what happens anyway. As the Mount tries to expand their adjunct garden (called Eden), in-fighting and bickering and old-fashioned distrust threaten to divide the community, and then, because it's the zombie apocalypse, shit hits the fan. But within the Mount you have superheroes, you have former gang members, you have the remnants of an elite military unit, plus regular folks, all of them with different needs and expectations, so naturally you're going to get conflict. And in a time of plenty, people become petty, because the stakes aren't as high and they have energy to act like The Real Housewives of the Apocalypse.
All of which happens, but it's under the duress of their food supply going up in flames. I just couldn't buy into that aspect of it, mostly because I wasn't sold that these people were starting to feel desperate. It just sort of felt like conflict for conflict's sake.
Which is the other issue I had with the titular "ex-isle" part of the book. The floating ship island, Lemuria, which Zzap refers to as "Waterworld except believable" (stay away from the fourth wall, I'm pleading with you), is run by a superpowered guy named Maleko, who transforms into Nautilus, who is reminiscent of DC's King Shark (a giant sharkman character featured in an episode of season 2 of The Flash). Problem being, Nautilus is really a supervillain pretending to be a superhero, so he does things which supervillains do because he's a supervillain. There's no nuance to this guy. Shark = bad, the end.
It does lead to two of the coolest scenes in the book, however. One where Zzzap and St. George are held prisoner while being manacled to children with the threat of other kids being drowned should they attempt to escape. Zzzap can't transform from his paraplegic self into his energy form without killing the kid, and superstrong George can't break out without the other kids drowning. The only way to constrain characters this powerful is by leashing them with their conscience. The second cool scene is where Corpse Girl is torn in two by Nautilus and she has to pull herself back together. The problem being that she has trouble forming permanent memories, so each time she wakes up she goes through the shock of discovering her condition all over again.
But why can't people on the ships see what a supervillain Nautilus is? Some do, but most go along with using their children as human shields. I didn't buy into that at all.
I really liked the parts in Eden where the creator and pilot of the mecha suit Cerberus, Danielle, has to confront her PTSD and reasonable agoraphobia. She's seen some heavy shit and she lives surrounded by millions of zombies. Of course she's messed up. I'm surprised more people aren't, really. But her overcoming of those issues is a standout part of the story and is really, really good.
However, what happened to Stealth? She's the Batman of this world who is always two steps ahead of everyone else and has contingency plans for her contingency plans, yet she is reduced to a cameo appearance. Seems like she'd have a backup plan for a catastrophe at Eden. Seems like she'd also talk her boyfriend St. George from flying out to the middle of the ocean when he could be better utilized at home in the midst of their crisis.
Perplexingly, there's a scene from the past featuring Gorgon, a character I only vaguely recall from previous books in the series, and it has no relevance whatsoever. He shows up and then never reappears, almost like he was in an earlier draft and Clines forgot to delete that chapter. It's also weird because there's a nearly identical flashback featuring St. George which covers almost the exact same material, and it shows him leaving a bitten, about-to-turn father on a roof outside the Mount so his daughter and wife don't have to see him become a zombie and then get shot in the head, and it turns out that's the zombie guy who shows up in Eden and is instrumental in Danielle's PTSD scenes.
George and Zzzap don't kill Nautilus after defeating him and foiling his plan to nuke Los Angeles, which was bizarre to me. Maybe it's supposed to be a parallel with the story of Zombie Dad and how killing someone might keep them from their destiny that ultimately leads to something good or whatever, but it's pretty well buried in there and that's sort of muddled thinking, even for a fantasy such as this.
Like I said up top, parts are really good and parts are pretty bad. Strange.
Also strange is the fact that Clines has an afterward explaining how this book was rushed and he used an outline, which he hates to do. I doubt I would be able to tell either of those things from what I read here, but the story does feel poorly thought-out, which is not something I've really noticed about the other books in this series. I kind of suspect he was fighting both the deadline and the uncomfortable constraints of outlining which caused him to be not as thoughtful about the plot or characters this time. Less focus on the bad things and more focus on the structure would help in the future.
vaderbird's review against another edition
3.0
5 star - Perfect
4 star - i would recommend
3 star - good
2 star - struggled to complete
1 star - could not finish
4 star - i would recommend
3 star - good
2 star - struggled to complete
1 star - could not finish