gwimo's review against another edition
dark
funny
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
theatomicpirategirl's review
2.0
A zombie point of view story where the zombies are getting “better”? I am sensing a trend…
“Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car-crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket to the SPCA to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere. Darkly funny, surprisingly touching, and gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader, Breathers is a romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com, for short) that will leave you laughing, squirming, and clamoring for more.”
Let me preface this review with this little back story.
Me reading this book is a case of cover love. I just thought it was so clever and cute. And I have an affinity for covers. A stellar cover is usually a determining factor in me picking out books to read (i.e. Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instrument series). So I put this book in my GoodReads list of “to-read” and my dear friend Jenn (who is my Zombie Apocalypse Sister in Arms) told me in a few words, I have this book, you can borrow it, but don’t get your hopes up. I should have taken this as a warning.
The idea of Breathers is good. Clever even. And the writing is pretty decent. There’s a bit more humor in this zombie POV than in Warm Bodies (see my review on my blog!). And that’s where my praise for this book ends. Yeah. Sorry Mr. Browne. I had a hard time getting into this book. It was just sort of blasé. Oh! Good word! Anyway…I’m going to break down this review by what this book promised to deliver on and fell short on doing.
1. “Darkly Funny.” Now, don’t get me wrong, folks who are fans of this book, there were some funny parts in this book that made me chuckle. But most of the time I was too busy trying to decided if I should feel bad for Andy for the stuff him and zombie-kind put up with, or smack him like a bitch because he’s acting like one. There is only some much “but you would only understand if you were a zombie” to describe how it is to be a zombie. Honestly, see it as a cop-out for trying to weave emotions into a zombie and making us, the readers, understand.
2. “Surprisingly touching.” Really? Are you sure? Are those zombie support meetings that Andy goes to suppose to make us feel a deeper connection to zombie-kind because honestly, I was left not feeling surprisingly touched, but more bored. I suppose having Andy and the others start to magically “heal” and the emotions of dealing and then to have Fate piss all over it could be seen as touching, but I just couldn’t get behind Andy as a hero. I get that his life sucks, but dude, really? Grow a pair of balls and be a George Romero zombie for Christ sake!
3. “Gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader.” Liar, liar, pants on fire! Yeah, the zombies eat people. But where’s the fury? The hunger? The natural urge for survival? Oh wait. It’s totally not there. There is only one scene where Andy finally acts like a zombie and chomps on his psychiatrists face. The rest of the time, Andy and company are feasting on “Breathers” like they are at some family get together. Just because zombies are eating regular humans, doesn’t mean that it is gory. Gross? Yes. Gory? Well, let’s just say that I think whoever wrote the little review didn’t look up the word gory.
Can you tell I was totally unimpressed with this book? I have no problem with the idea of a zombie POV novel, I don’t. And I’m sure S.G. Browne is a lovely man. He can totally write. It’s good. I just think this one fell kind of short of the finishing line.
Sorry Mr. Browne…
“Meet Andy Warner, a recently deceased everyman and newly minted zombie. Resented by his parents, abandoned by his friends, and reviled by a society that no longer considers him human, Andy is having a bit of trouble adjusting to his new existence. But all that changes when he goes to an Undead Anonymous meeting and finds kindred souls in Rita, an impossibly sexy recent suicide with a taste for the formaldehyde in cosmetic products, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car-crash victim with an exposed brain and a penchant for Renaissance pornography. When the group meets a rogue zombie who teaches them the joys of human flesh, things start to get messy, and Andy embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will take him from his casket to the SPCA to a media-driven class-action lawsuit on behalf of the rights of zombies everywhere. Darkly funny, surprisingly touching, and gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader, Breathers is a romantic zombie comedy (rom-zom-com, for short) that will leave you laughing, squirming, and clamoring for more.”
Let me preface this review with this little back story.
Me reading this book is a case of cover love. I just thought it was so clever and cute. And I have an affinity for covers. A stellar cover is usually a determining factor in me picking out books to read (i.e. Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instrument series). So I put this book in my GoodReads list of “to-read” and my dear friend Jenn (who is my Zombie Apocalypse Sister in Arms) told me in a few words, I have this book, you can borrow it, but don’t get your hopes up. I should have taken this as a warning.
The idea of Breathers is good. Clever even. And the writing is pretty decent. There’s a bit more humor in this zombie POV than in Warm Bodies (see my review on my blog!). And that’s where my praise for this book ends. Yeah. Sorry Mr. Browne. I had a hard time getting into this book. It was just sort of blasé. Oh! Good word! Anyway…I’m going to break down this review by what this book promised to deliver on and fell short on doing.
1. “Darkly Funny.” Now, don’t get me wrong, folks who are fans of this book, there were some funny parts in this book that made me chuckle. But most of the time I was too busy trying to decided if I should feel bad for Andy for the stuff him and zombie-kind put up with, or smack him like a bitch because he’s acting like one. There is only some much “but you would only understand if you were a zombie” to describe how it is to be a zombie. Honestly, see it as a cop-out for trying to weave emotions into a zombie and making us, the readers, understand.
2. “Surprisingly touching.” Really? Are you sure? Are those zombie support meetings that Andy goes to suppose to make us feel a deeper connection to zombie-kind because honestly, I was left not feeling surprisingly touched, but more bored. I suppose having Andy and the others start to magically “heal” and the emotions of dealing and then to have Fate piss all over it could be seen as touching, but I just couldn’t get behind Andy as a hero. I get that his life sucks, but dude, really? Grow a pair of balls and be a George Romero zombie for Christ sake!
3. “Gory enough to satisfy even the most discerning reader.” Liar, liar, pants on fire! Yeah, the zombies eat people. But where’s the fury? The hunger? The natural urge for survival? Oh wait. It’s totally not there. There is only one scene where Andy finally acts like a zombie and chomps on his psychiatrists face. The rest of the time, Andy and company are feasting on “Breathers” like they are at some family get together. Just because zombies are eating regular humans, doesn’t mean that it is gory. Gross? Yes. Gory? Well, let’s just say that I think whoever wrote the little review didn’t look up the word gory.
Can you tell I was totally unimpressed with this book? I have no problem with the idea of a zombie POV novel, I don’t. And I’m sure S.G. Browne is a lovely man. He can totally write. It’s good. I just think this one fell kind of short of the finishing line.
Sorry Mr. Browne…
jcschildbach's review
2.0
"Breathers" seems like it should have been an easier read than it was. It has short chapters, and isn't particularly demanding, and the gross-out stuff wasn't all that gross. But I had a hard time getting into it, despite a long-term love of most things zombie. Like many other reviews note, the pop-culture references are nearly constant, which makes the writing feel pretty lazy--letting references to movies and TV do a lot of the work, or at least fill up a lot of the space. Having the narrator living in a wine cellar with a TV set allowed several pages of the book to be taken up with just the names of wines and TV shows/movies (although not all at once).
As other reviewers have also noted, there seems to be way too much of an attempt to emulate Chuck Palahniuk. But, as anyone who has read Pahlaniuk knows, Pahlaniuk's writing reaches depths of macabre humor and depravity that cannot be achieved in a work on a subject as mild as zombies. And Pahlaniuk's pop-culture references tend toward social critique, rather than hey-I-get-that-reference filler.
Which is not to say that Browne's book does not contain social critique. It does. Unfortunately, much of it is rather heavy-handed--having zombies caged by the SPCA when they get out of line, referencing Rosa Parks during a bus ride gone bad, and an especially annoying-bordering-on-offensive passage that enumerates the parallels between the zombies of "Breathers" and various members of minority groups in the history of the United States. It's as if Browne didn't expect his readers to pick up on the not-so-subtle social commentary without him spelling it all out.
In addition, the bulk of the "villains" were pretty flat--an uptight father and distant mother, an inattentive therapist, and frat boys.
And there were a number of things that just didn't make sense, like how the narrator could eat even though his face was too busted up to speak, and why the hot zombie chick was interested in the zombie guy whose face was so busted up that he couldn't speak. Also, given the alleged hysteria and discrimination aimed at the zombies, it seemed a bit of a stretch that, for instance, missing persons wouldn't automatically be attributed to foul play by zombies--and if the zombies are to blame, how the hell could they be getting away with it? Simply put, Browne frequently skates around things that need explaining. And providing the additional details would have helped steer away from that feeling of lazy writing and lazy plotting that pervades the book.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that any sympathy that is built up for the zombies in the first half (which really isn't that much) is undone by the events of the second half, which would need to be a whole lot funnier and/or a whole lot more gruesome to hit the kind of payoff that a novel of this subject matter demands. Instead, Browne does not earn an emotional buy-in from the reader, so the more sentimental elements don't ring true, the comedy is merely amusing on occasion rather than riotously funny, and not a single gross-out element is actually disturbing enough to make a reader's skin crawl, much less to stay with the reader after the book is done.
As other reviewers have also noted, there seems to be way too much of an attempt to emulate Chuck Palahniuk. But, as anyone who has read Pahlaniuk knows, Pahlaniuk's writing reaches depths of macabre humor and depravity that cannot be achieved in a work on a subject as mild as zombies. And Pahlaniuk's pop-culture references tend toward social critique, rather than hey-I-get-that-reference filler.
Which is not to say that Browne's book does not contain social critique. It does. Unfortunately, much of it is rather heavy-handed--having zombies caged by the SPCA when they get out of line, referencing Rosa Parks during a bus ride gone bad, and an especially annoying-bordering-on-offensive passage that enumerates the parallels between the zombies of "Breathers" and various members of minority groups in the history of the United States. It's as if Browne didn't expect his readers to pick up on the not-so-subtle social commentary without him spelling it all out.
In addition, the bulk of the "villains" were pretty flat--an uptight father and distant mother, an inattentive therapist, and frat boys.
And there were a number of things that just didn't make sense, like how the narrator could eat even though his face was too busted up to speak, and why the hot zombie chick was interested in the zombie guy whose face was so busted up that he couldn't speak. Also, given the alleged hysteria and discrimination aimed at the zombies, it seemed a bit of a stretch that, for instance, missing persons wouldn't automatically be attributed to foul play by zombies--and if the zombies are to blame, how the hell could they be getting away with it? Simply put, Browne frequently skates around things that need explaining. And providing the additional details would have helped steer away from that feeling of lazy writing and lazy plotting that pervades the book.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that any sympathy that is built up for the zombies in the first half (which really isn't that much) is undone by the events of the second half, which would need to be a whole lot funnier and/or a whole lot more gruesome to hit the kind of payoff that a novel of this subject matter demands. Instead, Browne does not earn an emotional buy-in from the reader, so the more sentimental elements don't ring true, the comedy is merely amusing on occasion rather than riotously funny, and not a single gross-out element is actually disturbing enough to make a reader's skin crawl, much less to stay with the reader after the book is done.
acecatlady's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
mehsi's review
2.0
I was really interested in this book. It sounded like a totally great new view on zombies.
Our main character fell asleep behind the wheel and he and his wife get killed... well actually she gets killed, and he comes back from the dead in the mortuary.
Welcome back to the world... the world isn't happy to see you. Zombies have no rights, can't go to stores and many other things, it totally isn't fair, especially since no one asked to be revived back.
Andy visits a therapist, goes to a support group, and also tries to protest (which fails).
He then meets Ray, who introduces him to some new things. I already had a feeling those things were But we only find out a bit later what it really is, and what kind of awesome stuff they apparently do to a zombie.
And that is where, for me the story just slipped away. I loved the beginning, Andy's struggles, Andy who falls in love, Andy who tries his best to change things. But now... he is just a killer, just another monster. And I am sad about it.
I really loved the book, but with the last part, them eating/killing people. No, just no. :( I skipped most of the last part. When we finally get to the whole right/petition part that happened in the first part, I am happy, finally something good again. Sad that we had a whole killing part, and that it will be very interesting when they will find out he killed people. But ok, the book redeems itself (only a bit, since there is still enough killing and such) with the whole media and attention part. Though I really wish they skipped the whole: Eat Breather, Breather good, Breather NOM. :\
Well the almost end part was interesting, kinda expected though. All the attention, and I am sure people can put one + one together with people going missing all of the sudden. But still it was sad. Though I really started disliked Andy and Rita and the rest of the zombies, this was kind of an overdose. The whole revenge part was just... nope. Not really a good idea if you are fighting for zombie rights and all. And the end part, just typical zombie behaviour, and not something I signed up for when I read the blurb of this book.
I still want some answer though, like why do some people revive? Why all the hate, after all zombies have been around for ages, and many other questions.
I was planning on buying this book, but now I will not. Good book for about 60% but then it just goes down the drain. :\
Our main character fell asleep behind the wheel and he and his wife get killed... well actually she gets killed, and he comes back from the dead in the mortuary.
Welcome back to the world... the world isn't happy to see you. Zombies have no rights, can't go to stores and many other things, it totally isn't fair, especially since no one asked to be revived back.
Andy visits a therapist, goes to a support group, and also tries to protest (which fails).
He then meets Ray, who introduces him to some new things. I already had a feeling those things were
Spoiler
humans or Breathers as they are called by the zombies.And that is where, for me the story just slipped away. I loved the beginning, Andy's struggles, Andy who falls in love, Andy who tries his best to change things. But now... he is just a killer, just another monster. And I am sad about it.
I really loved the book, but with the last part, them eating/killing people. No, just no. :( I skipped most of the last part. When we finally get to the whole right/petition part that happened in the first part, I am happy, finally something good again. Sad that we had a whole killing part, and that it will be very interesting when they will find out he killed people. But ok, the book redeems itself (only a bit, since there is still enough killing and such) with the whole media and attention part. Though I really wish they skipped the whole: Eat Breather, Breather good, Breather NOM. :\
Well the almost end part was interesting, kinda expected though. All the attention, and I am sure people can put one + one together with people going missing all of the sudden. But still it was sad. Though I really started disliked Andy and Rita and the rest of the zombies, this was kind of an overdose. The whole revenge part was just... nope. Not really a good idea if you are fighting for zombie rights and all. And the end part, just typical zombie behaviour, and not something I signed up for when I read the blurb of this book.
I still want some answer though, like why do some people revive? Why all the hate, after all zombies have been around for ages, and many other questions.
I was planning on buying this book, but now I will not. Good book for about 60% but then it just goes down the drain. :\
bookishkathrine's review
3.0
I wanted to really like it because I love zombies, but I had trouble sympathizing with the main characters, which is a huge issue. Plus, the writing style is not amazing, just okay. Only for true zombie lovers; others would just be disgusted.
valoriedalton's review
4.0
Just because you die doesn't mean life is over. Imagine an alternate universe where zombie's are a part of every day life, and find themselves outsiders in a world that loathes them more than fears them. These misunderstoods rise from the grave and must learn to exist alongside the living. These are not the fearsome flesh eating zombies that stalk the living, but rather they are the stalked. Forget the taste of human flesh. Main character Andy is in just that predicament. He finds a group of kindred spirits at an Undead Anonymous meeting. It is within this group that he learns to come to terms with his new unlife, and he learns to embrace what he is rather than skulk through dark streets aware of his rotting form. Humor takes a dark turn when Andy and his friend discover the joys of human flesh, and the regenerative power that comes from eating real human flesh. Those who were once the scared, the rotting, the "other," now discover the source of their power. There is some gruesome but amusing scenes, my favorite being the invasion of a frat house that doesn't end well for either human or zombie. Now I am sure there are people out there who would try to liken this struggle to others, who will make some sort of in depth social commentary on the concept, but not me. I choose instead to appreciate this for what it is: a story that takes the terrifying, mindless monster that is a zombie, and gives it a mind. A more human zombie is still not human, but yet we are faced with the perplexing paradox of living, breathing, very real feelings within. On one hand, this makes the story sweeter. On the other hand, it makes the situations that much more bizarre. This is a must read for those who are into the zombie genre. The list of zombie books is becoming an endless repeat of the same formula, over and over again. It is hard to say that there is anything truly fresh and new, but this is not the genre's fault. A sweet, human look at zombies may not be what fans want, at least those fans who love the mindless, drooling horror of running or, to Romero's credit and opinion, shuffling zombies. And the "human side" of zombies is being explored through other media like movies. But this book was years ahead of all that. It's not a complex story, it's not a revolutionary genre story, it's not a serious read that inspires deeper thought on the meanings of equality. It's just a light, fun, sometimes sweet, sometimes disturbing read.
csdaley's review
4.0
Liked it. Had a few moments where I thought it was a little all over the place but it did keep me completely involved in a zombie story in a way I never had before.
teerah's review
3.0
Not a bad book, considering it's Browne's first novel and the subject matter is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. His use of language gets repetitive early on and he's unnecessarily descriptive of already obvious puns or jokes that the main character, Andy, comes up with. Also, his characters are wholly one-dimensional. Where it redeems itself is the original plot and fast pace. It was an engaging read, and successfully draws the reader in to sympathize with flesh-eating zombies.
tiffany8's review
dark
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0