Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

'R' is a zombie. He has no name, no memories and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead.
Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows - warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can't understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.
This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won't be changed without a fight...

Warm Bodies starts out with so much potential and seeming like a great read. But then, slowly things start to unravel. No feasibly explanation is ever given to anything. Why are the zombies changing? How can the Americans visit Paris after the world ended? How is death reversed?

Though I think it's well written overall and holds a great idea and great potential, it's poorly executed or just severely lacking. It's love between somebody who'd never fall in love, it's overly smart teenagers speaking words and thoughts "normal" teenagers don't have the education or thought pattern to even fathom and it's full to the brim with plot holes or at least lack of explanations. I don't need a detailed scientific report on how this change could happen, but I need something more than what I was given. As it is, it's just overly convenient and quite silly.

(I know it's just the first book in a series, but you know what the job of a the first book is? To be good enough to make me want to read the next. This one doesn't do that job very well)

I liked it, but it let me down. I've yet to see the film, but having seen the trailer I appreciate they've chosen a guy who's the same age as Julie. In the book R sounds like he's 30+ at least. And that's a bit creepy, even if he wasn't a zombie.... which he is. And yet smoochies still happen. Oh hey necrophilia!

	Warm Bodies Warm Bodies #1 by Isaac Marion ISBN13: 9780099549345 240 pages / published in 2010
	Review by Iben Jakobsen, BoB, 2014