Review: Blackout by Mira Grant

Title: Blackout
Author: Mira Grant
Series: Newsflesh Trilogy #3
Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars

632 pages
Published May 22th 2012 by Orbit
Purchased

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Okay, I know it for sure now. This book is one of my all time favourites.

This book. This whole series. It's so, so, so GOOD.

In this third and last part in the Newsflesh Trilogy, the After The End Times bloggers play the endgame. It's now or never, all or nothing. All the bodies they left in their wake are a dark presence they have to live with. Will they uncover the conspiracy before the government finds them and shut them up once and for all?

To be honest, I wouldn't recommend Blackout, or any of the books in this series if you are looking for a gruesome zombie book. Because to be honest, the amount of zombie encounters in this book is minimal. It's not about the shambling dead. It's about how fear can be used to control countries. It's about how easily people are persuaded when they are afraid, and how easy it is to scare them. These books are so much more than just zombie reads.

And it has intricate story lines! Hurray! I loved how all the threads came together in this one, and the fact that no questions were left unanswered. Blackout had some massive plot twists that literally made me go "oh my god oh my god what's happening". It's that good.

The only fault is something I don't mind personally, but I get why other people might get annoyed by it. There is some repetition in sentences and scenes. For example, the main characters are subjected to blood tests at every single building. But the thing is, repeating the fact that there are blood tests over and over again actually has a purpose in the story. It shows how paranoid everyone has become. It shows how repressed and twisted their society actually is. There was no unnecessary repetition in the story in my opinion.

If I was rich, I would gift these books to every person I know. Since I can't even afford buying myself new books, I will have to settle for recommending it to everyone I know. Seriously guys. These are keepers.

Blurb

Rise up while you can. -Georgia Mason

The year was 2014. The year we cured cancer. The year we cured the common cold. And the year the dead started to walk. The year of the Rising.

The year was 2039. The world didn't end when the zombies came, it just got worse. Georgia and Shaun Mason set out on the biggest story of their generation. The uncovered the biggest conspiracy since the Rising and realized that to tell the truth, sacrifices have to be made.

Now, the year is 2041, and the investigation that began with the election of President Ryman is much bigger than anyone had assumed. With too much left to do and not much time left to do it in, the surviving staff of After the End Times must face mad scientists, zombie bears, rogue government agencies-and if there's one thing they know is true in post-zombie America, it's this:

Things can always get worse.

Other reviews you might be interested in

• Review: Deadline by Mira Grant (5/5 Stars)
• Review: Generation by William Knight (4/5 Stars)
• Review: The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff (4/5 Stars)
• Review: Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer by Cecily von Ziegesar (4/5 Stars)

Review: Deadline by Mira Grant

Deadline by Mira Grant
(Newsflesh Trilogy #2)

5 out of 5 stars

Published by Orbit
This review contains spoilers for the previous book in the series

Whoa.

After reading Feed I had pretty high expectations for Deadline. I was pretty sceptical to how I would like the book without leading lady George. I shouldn't have been worried, Deadline blew me away with the power of a tornado.

After George's amplification Shaun is a wreck. He has turned away from his Irwin nature and is a shell of his former self. And oh yeah, he is going crazy. He talks to his dead sister in his head. The only thing driving him is uncovering the people responsible of her death. With his new crew he follows dubious leads and gets caught up in a conspiracy of a size they had no way of expecting.

I would like to compare Deadline to Feed for a bit, so you can get an idea of how this story is like. Where Feed was very heavy on the blogging mechanics, in Deadline ratings aren't important any more. As the story is told from Shaun's point of view, and he really doesn't care about the ratings, they take a background. He's still writing posts, and After The End Times still exists, but there are less massive descriptions of them maintaining their blog. It was a change for the better in my opinion.

I was naive to think Feed had a nice deep story. So, so naive. In Deadline the true digging starts. The conspiracy goes way, way farther than you will ever be expecting. By the end of the book the you-know-what is hitting the fan. I'm getting goosebumps right now by just thinking of it. There is something seriously wrong in the world after the Rising.

Deadline is a very emotional story. Shaun tries to deal with his sisters death, failing miserably. There is actually a little bit of romance, which surprised me. The After The End Times crew is in real danger now. Not just from zombies, but from something way bigger. And these people aren't even afraid any more to sacrifice some innocent bystanders. You just don't know when something bad is going to happen, and how bad it will be. I read the last two-hundred pages in one sitting because I just didn't want to put it down.

I'm thinking about pushing my boyfriend into reading Feed just so I can let him read Deadline, I loved this book so much.

I cannot wait until Blackout is released. That book is going to be so epic.

Blurb

Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organization he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn't seem as fun when you've lost as much as he has.

But when a CDC researcher fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun has a newfound interest in life. Because she brings news-he may have put down the monster who attacked them, but the conspiracy is far from dead.

Now, Shaun hits the road to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun.

Other reviews you might be interested in

• Review: Feed by Mira Grant (4/5 Stars)
• Review: For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund (5/5 Stars)
• Review: Divergent by Veronica Roth (5/5 Stars)

More links

• Author page
• Press
• Goodreads

Review: Feed by Mira Grant

Feed by Mira Grant
(Newsflesh Trilogy #1)

4 out of 5 stars

Published by Orbit

Not one for zombie books usually, I picked this one up because it came so highly recommended. The plot sounded like it had more to it than some shambling corpses moaning "braaaaiiins" while doing the zombie shuffle. I was expecting interesting zombie novel. I got blood-racing mystery, action and heart-wrenching drama.

Imagine a world where every single person is infected with a virus. This virus will turn you into a zombie when you die. Imagine more than seventy-five percent of the world population killed by the virus. This is the world Georgia and Shaun are born in. Adopted brother and sister form with their best friend Buffy the team of After the End Times, a blog dedicated to news. But blogging is a dangerous business in 2040...

Feed is a good book. It has a rock-steady foundation and lovable characters that inhabit its world. Even if you don't like the actual content, I don't think anyone can say this book was not thought through. Usually I find little plot holes in a book. They don't bother me much, but they're there. I couldn't find any in Feed. The characters stayed within their personality. If there was a computer in scene one, it's still there in scene two. I admire this extend of editing that goes into this book.

I loved that there was a good reason for the zombies to turn, you know.. into zombies. I hate lame excuses like, they just turned up this way! There was an extensive background that made it a whole lot more believable for me.

The extend of the details will put some people off. There is a lot of in-depth philosophy, info on the way viruses behave, and the inner workings in the blogging world. This book is VERY heavy on the blog mechanics. Because people don't leave their houses any more, except if they must, blogs are the new form of entertainment. They will be the first to tell you where a new outbreak is. There are a lot of different styles of blogging, and there is a lot of emphasis on the characteristics of each. As a blogger myself, I found this quite interesting, but I can totally understand why some people won't.

If you decide to give Feed a try, be prepared to invest a bit in the story. The plot doesn't always move along all that fast, but it will get there. And if it does, you will be amazed.

Blurb

In 2014, two experimental viruses—a genetically engineered flu strain designed by Dr. Alexander Kellis, intended to act as a cure for the common cold, and a cancer-killing strain of Marburg, known as "Marburg Amberlee"—escaped the lab and combined to form a single airborne pathogen that swept around the world in a matter of days. It cured cancer. It stopped a thousand cold and flu viruses in their tracks.

It raised the dead.

Millions died in the chaos that followed. The summer of 2014 was dubbed "The Rising," and only the lessons learned from a thousand zombie movies allowed mankind to survive. Even then, the world was changed forever. The mainstream media fell, Internet news acquired an undeniable new legitimacy, and the CDC rose to a new level of power.

Set twenty years after the Rising, the Newsflesh trilogy follows a team of bloggers, led by Georgia and Shaun Mason, as they search for the brutal truths behind the infection. Danger, deceit, and betrayal lurk around every corner, as does the hardest question of them all:

When will you rise?

Other reviews you might be interested in

• Review: Alienation by Jon S. Lewis (4/5 Stars)
• Review: Bumped by Megan McCafferty (2/5 Stars)
• Review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (5/5 Stars)

More links

• Author page
• Press
• Goodreads