This is our first party in years.Oh, yes, such danger. The walking Dead must have addled your brain, Eleanor. “And what of our party tonight?” Mama insisted. One came to the train depot, so everyone was evacuated.” “The ones people have been talking about. I shrank back, fighting the urge to run past her through the open door. It's of the 'Oh, pish, posh! Zombies again?! How completely inconvenient because they're going to ruin our tea party!' sort of catastrophe, which is to say, none at all. The zombies are called 'walking dead,' like the ones in the show of the same name, but with so little urgency and panic that they became completely redundant and dull. The fact that there are zombies rising up from their graves and terrorizing the whole of Philadelphia was made completely underwhelming. The setting in this book is not steampunk so much as 'Huh?' Yeah, sure, the zombies are rising, but it was entirely unclear whether they had, in fact, existed in the past or not, or if this is an entirely new phenomenon. Her beloved older brother, Elijah, is missing. Zombies? Oh, posh! We must attend the opera!: This book is about Eleanor Fitts (Miss Fitt, misfit.ha.ha.yeah, we fucking get it, Eleanor), a 16-year old girl living in 1876 Philadelphia, where the dead have begun rising from their grave. It was a wholly implausible book, and I'm not talking about the fact that the dead are rising in 1876 Philadelphia.ġ. The characters themselves are two-dimensional. The setting and the characters's behaviors are inconsistent. This book thinks itself a 'steampunk' novel. The world building is weird and incomplete.

This book is strange, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I feel like I could walk around with a sharp stick and kill a bunch myself because they were so unconvincing as objects of abject terror. If you want terrifying zombie action, turn away now, the zombies in this book are not dangerous, they are corpses, but they're of the 'first episode of Walking Dead' sort of boring, which is to say they're rotting, they're shambling, they smell REALLY, REALLY bad, but they're completely unterrifying in every way. If I had to choose one word to describe this book, it would be unconvincing. See, in China, girls keep their heads bald like the boys, yeah? Then when we’re the age to become a woman, we bind our feet and grow out our hair.WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? THIS. “It means that as long as I still shave my hair, I’m free. “In China we say, ‘The girl with the full hair is not as free as the girl with the bare head.’'

Something strange and deadly