Book Review- Bad Taste in Boys by Carrie Harris

Title: Bad Taste in Boys

 Author: Carrie Harris

Series:  Kate Grable #1

Published:  12 July 2011 by Delacorte Press

Length: 201  pages

Warnings: zombies,romance, 14+(my recommendation)

Source: Won from Reads with Reckless Abandon

Other info: This is Carrie Harris’ debut novel

Summary : Someone’s been a very bad zombie. Super smartie Kate Grable gets to play doctor, helping out her high school football team. Not only will the experience look good on her college apps, she gets to be thisclose to her quarterback crush, Aaron. Then something disturbing happens. Kate finds out the couch has given the team steroids. Except the vials she finds don’t exactly contain steroids. Whatevers in them is turning hot gridiron hunks into mindless flesh eating zombies. Unless she can find an antidote, no-one is safe. Not Aaron, not Kate’s brother, not her best friend, not even Kate.

Review: Kate Grable is the smart girl at her school. As a result, she gets to be medic for her schoolfootball team. And one day, she discovers the team has been given what could be steroids, but after some thought, aren’t. How does she know this? Because one of the team players tries to devour her. Not in the nice romantic way, but literally devour, taking a huge chunk out of her lip. Turns out the steroids are turning the team into zombies. And it is highly infectious. It is up to Kate, love interest Aaron, and various other people to get the virus under control before it’s too late.

First thoughts- awesome premises. Never mind that I didn’t understand a little of the summary(The bit about the quarterback. I am terrible at American terms. And I wish someone would explain them all to me so I don’t spend half my time wondering what it means. Oh well.). The cover, I don’t understand the significance of the sugar lips, even though Carrie spent quite a long time featuring them on her blog. I also found it interesting that neither the title nor the cover hint at all at the zombie element. It does heavily forshadow the romance element though.

Zombie romance I am a little wary of. While it is a rising genre, I believe that the zombie really does belong in the land of terrorising the living instead of falling in love with it (I did a whole post over at Paranormal Wastelands about this). But these zombies also did a fair bit of their terrorising job, so I don’t feel too upset at how the zombies are portrayed I this,

When I actually got this, I was surprised at how short it was. From the summary, I was expecting something a little around 300 pages, as I wouldn’t have thought a book with so many ways you could go with would be closer to 200. But it worked. The small amount of pages requires a huge amount of pace to get anything done in the book, and we got a lot of pace. From the start, something new was happening or being uncovered, which kept the story going.

Kate is obviously a very strong character, from how she deals with the zombies to her clear narration with how she feels and what happened. Some parts made me laugh a lot, possibly because of what was actually happening, and possible because of the way that Kate told it.

Overall:  Strength 4 tea to a good zombie novel that there really should have been more of.
Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Author website |