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Summary
Summary
Goth girl Phoebe has never run with the popular crowd at school. However, no one can believe it when she falls for Tommy Williams, the leader of the dead kids--the literally dead, living impaired kids who are doing their best to fit into a society that doesn't want them.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Dante, aka Danny Gray, is half-vamp and half-wulf, and in his world, this means disaster. There are only three distinct and very separate classes. The elite are the vampyres-rich, powerful, and beautiful. In between are the humans, tolerated because they admire vampires and acknowledge their dominance. Then there are the werewolves, who are poor, ugly, despised. They must register themselves and during the time of the "Change" are forced to live in prisonlike compounds. Danny and his sister had genetic treatments when they were young to suppress their wulven genes and allow their vampyre side to take control. The treatments worked for his sister, but Danny became sick and was unable to finish them. As a result he has vamp-blue eyes but the darker coloring and the stockier build of a werewolf. Everyone in his almost all-vamp high school assumes that he is half-vamp and half human; only a few close friends know the truth. When he starts exhibiting wulf behavior, Danny is terrified but realizes that he must accept who he is before time runs out. Red Moon Rising is a well-written coming-of-age story with a diverse cast of characters. Moore tackles important issues such as self-esteem, prejudice/discrimination, loyalty, and acceptance, all woven into a teen paranormal adventure drama. The ending leaves some unanswered questions that hopefully will be addressed in a sequel. Fans of the genre will enjoy this different spin on the supernatural.-Donna Rosenblum, Floral Park Memorial High School, NY (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Waters's strong first novel introduces a cast of memorable characters--both dead and alive. For unknown reasons, American teenagers who die are coming back to life. Known as the "living impaired" or "differently biotic," these teens walk among the living and even attend school, but face massive prejudice. Phoebe Kendall, a junior at Oakvale High in Connecticut, is alive and well, but shockingly, she has a crush on Tommy Williams, who's dead. Her best friend, Margi, thinks she's crazy, and her friend and neighbor Adam, who has a secret thing for Phoebe, can't understand what she sees in the dead kid. The situation gets worse when school bully Pete Martinsburg's hatred of the undead leads him to lash out violently. The dialogue can be stiff and Waters leaves many questions unanswered (Do the dead teens age? Can they be hurt and then heal? Why do they go to school?). In balance, however, the creepy premise is solid enough, and will easily capture the reader's imagination. Ages 12-up. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Phoebe is a self-reflective Goth girl. Tommy's a zombielike "differently biotic" teen struggling to reintegrate into society after (un)death. Their relationship exacerbates tensions between the living and undead at their high school and in the community. Understated prose, impressive depth of character, and fresh, poignant twists on horror-genre themes distinguish this nuanced study of grief, guilt, prejudice, and friendship. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Is it too many junk-food preservatives? Brain patterns rewired by first-person shooter games? Or simply a sign of the Apocalypse? No one knows why deceased American teenagers are returning as zombies (please, call them "living impaired"), but it's happening. At progressive Oakvale High, Phoebe, who was Goth long before this phenomenon, wonders why she is attracted to differently biotic Tommy. Along with best friend Margi and childhood buddy Adam (who can't express his love for her), Phoebe joins Undead Studies, so she can understand what it's like to be dead in a living world and reconcile the recent death and return of another good friend. Not everyone, however, is so accepting of this dawn of the dead. Someone's kidnapping zombies, and one popular student, obsessed with a dead girlfriend who never returned, wants the dead to stay that way. Stephenie Meyer meets John Green in debut author Waters's wry, original supernatural romance, which blends sensitivity and deadpan humor to reflect a culture clash on both sides of the living spectrum. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
BURIED in the passing scenery of this summer's two teenager zombie novels are descriptions of a zombie bag lunch. Carrot sticks, mostly - in both novels - with a little yogurt or fruit on the side. Like adolescent girls across America, zombies seem susceptible to eating disorders - and not just in their taste for human brains. In Daniel Waters's first novel, "Generation Dead," the carrot sticks are a gateway food: the zombie girl who gnaws them wants to feel alive again. But the carrots in Brian James's "Zombie Blondes" are instruments of oppression. The popular girls at Maplecrest High will never accept a newcomer, Hannah Sanders, until she conforms to their dress code, their hair color and their joyless low-cal lunches. Maplecrest, Vt., is the kind of "timewarp town" that Hannah's father loves: "Nothing's changed in it since the time when he was a kid." It's also the sort of small town favored in horror films - both folksy and anonymous, with an aggressive high school sports following and plenty of spooky townspeople. Hannah herself can't take her eyes from Maggie Turner, head cheerleader and campus queen, who not only owns Maplecrest High - effortlessly - but makes the students around her tremble with longing and fear. Shrugging off a warning from a weird new friend named Lukas, Hannah tries out for the cheerleading squad. In "Generation Dead," teenagers all over America are coming back from the grave - cold, stiff, without a heartbeat, but strangely alive. A movement to support the "differently biotic" or "living impaired" arises, and some dead kids (aka "worm food," "corpsicles," "Children of Romero") re-enroll at high school, prompting a violent backlash. The main character is a goth poet named Phoebe who listens to the Creeps, the Misfits and Seraphim Shade: "bands that dressed like the living dead before there were any dead actually living." Witty and well written, "Generation Dead" is a classic desegregation story that also skewers adult attempts to make teenagers play nice. An unctuous father-daughter research team enlists a handful of students at Oakvale High for its work-study program on the differently biotic, but the most effective adult in the book is the coach who wants to arrange a hit on a zombie who's tried out for football ("case of beer to whoever puts him out"). Motivational speakers, politically correct speech and encounter groups come in for special ridicule. Traditionally, the zombie is not a literary horror but a cinematic one, which is perhaps why both novels adhere to the conventions of horror films. They take place in sleepy-seeming Anytowns with oldfashioned arboreal names; in both cases, the heroine falls for a handsome dead guy instead of the swell fella who really loves her. Their endings are similar. "Generation Dead" rebounds into something more original, but the end of "Zombie Blondes" could have been lifted from an episode of "The Twilight Zone." James's lark of a novel relies on high concept, fabulous cover art and a tagline in search of a movie poster: "They're beautiful. They're popular. They're dead." The author cultivates a lifeless prose that one can only hope is intentional, and he also seems to imagine a reader younger than his target Y.A. audience. Early in the novel, he devotes two paragraphs to the bombshell that the popular girls tend to be the prettiest. His heroine, too, seems. younger and sweeter than a teenager. Hannah's father, an ex-cop, drags her from town to town and can't keep a job. Yet his good-natured daughter can't yell at him "when he has that silly smile on his face and pats me on the shoulder. I've never been able to stay mad at him." It may be niggling to expect grace or surprise from a zombie novel, but two action scenes in "Zombie Blondes" show what the author can do when he isn't merely sketching. In one of these, Maggie Turner's squad of black-clad cheerleaders mesmerizes the crowd with chants of "D-E-A-T-H!" before the zombie football team mangles its opponents (always from distant schools, since the neighboring teams know better). They "shouted at the top of their lungs. Stomping their feet to the cadence. The bleachers trembling from the volume and vibration. Everyone's face as pale and blank as those on the field. Mouths moving mechanically. ... 'Still think I'm crazy?' Lukas whispers." But it doesn't matter what Hannah thinks; she wants just a touch of the cruel cheerleaders' power - for once, to know how it feels to be feared rather than teased and excluded. As in "Generation Dead," the real monster is rejection. Undead is scary, but uncool is worse. Regina Marler is the author of a literary history, "Bloomsbury Pie."