Book # 36 Dust

Since I couldn't get in to work today, because we got about 12 inches of snow last night, I read the book, Dust, by Joan Frances Turner. This book is about a girl who dies when she is fifteen, and is reborn as a zombie once she is buried. This book explores the science fiction world, and pushes the boundary of conventional thinking about life and death. Once Jessica, the main character, becomes a zombie, she is pulled into a nearby gang of zombies, and sets out to live the rest of her undead life in peace with friends. Although, this does not happen, the world turns upside down, and a new species takes over, and it's all that Jessica and her friends can do to survive something no one saw coming.

Lately, I have been a lot like everyone else, getting into this new zombie phase, for example my favorite game is Nazi zombies from Call of Duty. This new phase just like vampires recently, has seeped into literature, movies, music, and so much more. I admit that when I read the dust jacket of this book at the book sale, I was especially intrigued because it was about a girl that became a zombie? WOW! The more I read, the more I realized that it wasn't just about zombies, and science fiction, it was about humans, the ecosystem, our delicate balance, and the ever invisible line between life and death. The writer has so much sensory detail in this novel, that sometimes it's hard not to lose yourself in this apocalyptic world. The characters are so real, and so engaging that you begin to see them, and hear them, and be them. I love their way of speaking to each other, the unidentified waves rolling from their brains in the form of different styles of music. I loved the real and grotesque language the author used to describe the zombies, the fighting, the decay, the landscape, the diseases, and the vicious hunger that plagued them all.

While reading this book, I was reminded of another book I read a long time ago, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. This book although less grotesque and not about zombies, is also a critique on society, although Huxley writes about a utopia and Turner writes about a dystopia. Even so, they both write about society in such an honest and brutal way, that it makes people look past the zombies, and the clones, to what the moral of the story really is. Although, I don't want to spoil the book for you, so I'll let you figure that out.

I really enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it to those who like science fiction, and to those that are willing to live in a world where the undead walk the world, and the lines between life and death are blurred beyond your vision.

Rating: (out of seven stars)