/ Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel

Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel
467 Pages


Summary
Nora Dearly is an orphan and living with her mean old aunt in a "New Victorian" city. They have all of the values, clothes, etc of the past but with flat screen TV's, holograph things and such. Her dad died a year before the story begins and Nora is just coming out of mourning. On night she comes home for summer break from  boarding school she is suddenly attacked and kidnapped by what? ZOMBIES! What she doesn't know is that they are GOOD zombies, and are really trying to save her from something else. Nora is terrified and doesn't believe when they say that they are good zombies until she meets Bram Grizwald, a zombie as well, but there is something more to him. He helps her figure out what is after her and the truth behind her father's death.

My thoughts
Dearly, Departed has so much potential. It had lots of things that I like. Set in victorian(ish) times (although it was in the future) CHECK! an interesting idea and new paranormal creature (I've never read a book  about a zombie!)CHECK! A possible good love story with said creature CHECK! but is was missing a few things...a plot is the biggest thing that comes to mind.
Writing
Ugggg! ok, so honestly it took me almost 2 weeks to read this book. 2 weeks! That's like forever! considering that most books I can polish off in one day. The writing was so confusing! Maybe I'm stupid or something because a ton of reviews I read were like "amazingly written" blah blah blah but I really just didn't get it. There were a handful of times I had to go back and re-read passages a few times because they made no sense, and most times I still never understood but moved on because I really didn't care. I always read the first chapter of the books I order on amazon before I get them to see if I like the writing and the first chap was actually really good! I wanted to know more so I ordered it. Unfortunately that was the only good chapter I guess...

My other hang up with it was the point of views. Each chapter was from a different point of view from not 2, or even 3 for 5 characters! Only 2 of which were in the same place and interacting with each other. That's a ton! I felt like I was watching TV with my husband on remote control duty. Every time I got into a characters POV and their story BAM! it changes and I have to remember what was happening with the new character.
Plot
So the plot, or what little there was, was kind of dull. Infact, I'm not entirely sure I could quickly tell you what it was about. About 2/3 into the book my husband asked me how my book was and what it was about and I tried to explain it, but the lack of real plot made it hard to tell him exactly what it was about. It's about zombie soldiers who save a girl and...they do some stuff...something about her dad...and the zombie and the girl fall in love.

It also really bothered me that it kept referring to the fact that the society chose to live in Victorian times. It would have been better if the society just evolved back to that culture. I would believe that in could revert back naturally because of how trends from the past always seem to come to the present, but the way that just one day they as a society were like "I think we'll live in the victorian age! awesome! girls, get your corsets!" seems a little unlikely.

About 50 pages to the end and 1/12 weeks into it I remember sighing and thinking "is this not over yet?" for some reason I can't just not finish a book. It makes me feel like a mean person.

Romance
So I was super duper hesitant to even try this, but a few reviews said that "Lia Habel did for zombies what Stephenie Meyer did for vampires" and I was like, ok, I'll give it a shot. But folks, no matter how nice and charming they may be, or how many chemicals they are given to keep them from stinking and decomposing, a zombie will always and forever be a corpse. Nothing too romantic there. sorry. I really wanted to like this. I tried REALLLLY hard, but it did nothing for me.

Characterization
I think another reason it was so hard to get into was because the characters were hard to get to know. They seemed a little flat to me and didn't keep in the time period. It started out being pretty victorianishy (is that a word) and then towards the end it was like we were in modern days except all girls wore dresses. The multiple points of views didn't help either. It was too distracting and unnecessary. Because of this I found myself liking Nora's friend who was "back at the ranch" so to speak better than Nora herself. hum...


Overall
Not my favorite. I'm sad that I paid full price for this one (I usually never do, but since it was so new there were no used ones for cheap) I'm sad that I wasted my time, and I'm sad that I didn't fall in love with zombies. I should have trusted my gut that zombies are yucky, no matter how nice they are. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to read any others in the series.

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