Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Warm Bodies

4.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:

In Warm Bodies (2010), our world has been overrun by the zombies, and the few humans who are left are fighting a rearguard action. They huddle in walled enclosures, sending out occasional armed expeditions for food and supplies. Regular school classes have fallen by the wayside, replaced by classes and demonstrations on how to best kill a zombie permanently (head shots).

R is a zombie who doesn’t remember his past life, except that his name maybe started with the letter R. He can speak a few syllables, more than most of his zombie companions, and think complex thoughts that his tongue can’t share. R and hundreds of other zombies live in an abandoned airport, going on group hunts to the city to try to find food, in the form of humans. When they eat the brains of the Living, they experience fragments of the human’s memories, and it energizes them.

R and his friend M lead a zombie hunting party to the city one day and come across a group of humans who have ventured out of the stadium where they live. R attacks and kills Perry, the young man leading the group. As he bites into Perry’s brain, he’s hit with Perry’s memories of moments with his girlfriend Julie. When R recovers from these visions, he sees Julie cowering in a corner. Against all his zombie instincts, he rescues Julie from the other zombies and leads her back to his home, a 747 commercial jet parked at the end of a boarding tunnel. As R and Julie get to know each other better, Julie gradually loses her fear of R, R edges back toward humanity, and the two develop an unlikely friendship. But their relationship is a threat to those around them, both the humans and the Boneys, the animated and malignant skeletons that lead the zombie horde.

R is a zombie with a heart ― even if it’s not beating ― and philosophical thoughts that he can’t really share, since a zombie’s conversational abilities are so very limited. But he finds his tongue and heart are loosened as he gets to know Julie. And as R continues to snack on bits of Perry’s brain that he saved for later, many of Perry’s thoughts and memories are shared with him; kind of like in Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, Perry is often a separate voice in R’s head. But R’s feelings are his own. R’s narration is intelligent and engaging, dealing with the horrors of his murderous lifestyle with self-deprecatory humor that, together with the slowly developing romance, lightens the otherwise bleak post-apocalyptic setting.

I got all the way to the end of Warm Bodies before I realized how many connections Isaac Marion has made to Romeo and Juliet. R and Julie are the star-crossed couple, with the zombies and humans playing the roles of the houses of the Montagues and Capulets. Perry is the analogue of Paris, Juliet’s ill-fated lover; Julie’s best friend Nora takes on the Nurse’s role as Juliet’s confidante; and R’s zombie friend M stands in for Mercutio, Romeo’s friend.

Despite the many character connections, the plot of the story is Isaac Marion’s own original creation. It’s a quirky but moving mixture of science fiction and fantasy, shifting from a fairly straight zombiepocalypse near-future setting to something that is a little more meta, fantastical and symbolic in the end, not to mention heart-warming.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review, along with The New Hunger (the prequel novella) and The Burning World, the 2017 sequel. The publicist was feeling generous, so I totally scored. Lots of reading yet to do, but this first book definitely didn't disappoint.

Content advisory: Though Warm Bodies is classified as a YA book by the publisher (not the author), it contains adult language and themes, and fairly graphic and gruesome violence. Not recommended for younger or more sensitive readers.