"My Life as a White Trash Zombie" by Diana Rowland

310 pages

Angel Crawford isn't exactly a model citizen. She's a high school dropout with a pill habit and a criminal record. She hates living with her alcoholic deadbeat dad in the swamps of southern Louisiana, but she can't move out because she can't hold on to any of the crappy jobs she keeps getting fired from. Now on probation for a felony, it seems that Angel will never pull herself out of the downward spiral her life has taken. Everything changes one day when she wakes up in the ER after supposedly overdosing on painkillers. All she remembers is being in an horrible car crash, but she doesn't have a mark on her. Then she receives a mysterious, anonymous letter telling her there's a job waiting for her at the parish morgue, and she'd better take it--or else. When Angel starts working and realizes that she craves the brains she deals with at the morgue, she starts putting the pieces together and figures out that she's a zombie. The mystery is far from solved, however. How did she get this way? Who has been sending the anonymous letters? Is there a cure? Angel needs to get some answers before she turns into a raving monster.

I expected this to be just a fun, silly read, and it turned out to be much more than that. Sure, there were plenty of cheap jokes (of the white trash variety), but the main premise of the story is unique--a steady diet of brains keeps the zombies from decaying and actually makes them smarter, faster, and stronger--and there's a pretty good mystery that surprised me at the end (granted, I don't read a lot of mysteries, so I suppose I'm not too hard too fool). Angel is a frustrating character, but she grows a lot throughout the story (yes, even as a zombie) and I definitely sympathized with her by the conclusion. Looks like this is the first book in a series, so I look forward to more from Angel and her crew.