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There are many flaws in the writing of this overlong novel of life a generation after a zombie attack that wiped out at least a third of the world's population and left a society embattled by the ongoing threat of the infected. I stayed constantly frustrated with the book while still turning page after page to see what was going to happen next.

A first person narrative set in the future faces a fundamental challenge. How do you give us, the present day readers, the information we need to get a sense of the world of the novel? Grant solves this problem by having her narrator, Georgia Mason, state background facts that would not be needed by her contemporaries. I felt that Grant was so caught up in the details, sometimes interesting and sometimes not, of her researched world of zombie-infested America, that she could not build that world in a way that gave the reader the pleasures of learning it by seeing it in action. And then in Chapter 25, about 500 pages into the story with just less than 100 pages to go, she jumps the shark of narrative credibility, robbing the novel of any coherent voice or structure.

I read a review that described this as one zombie novel not aimed at the YA market, but that is surely the crowd that is gobbling it up. The young protagonists are stars of the blogosphere that serves as the only reputable source of news since the mainstream media was compromised by its inept handling of The Rising in 2012. Georgia and Shaun Mason, adopted by parents who lost their biological child to an infected Golden Retriever in the Rising, maintain a site called After the End Times. Her integrity as a reporter and his showmanship as an Irwin land them on the press corps of a presidential campaign. (Irwin? You will figure it out.) They uncover a terrorist plot and use the small army of international bloggers that work for them to expose it. Of course this is aimed at teenaged readers. I don't think a passage referring to a woman as a "cocksucking bitch" any longer takes a book out of that demographic.