Alba's Reviews > World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

{2 stars - second star is for a good concept }

WWZ is a great concept with a poor execution. The zombie war, the great apocalypse - great! Eyewitness accounts? Interesting! Interview style, all written in more or less the same voice with no centralised plot or characters? Um boring.

This took me more than a month to read, which is crazy unusual. It was just SO boring. Each perspective is just a few pages long, giving you only a few pages to meet someone new, decide if you care about them, and feel invested in their story, all the while knowing they'd be gone again in a few pages again, unlikely to show up again. And they all say the same thing - this is me, the zombies came, we fought them, we hid, we survived. Voila.

There were far too many perspectives. Too many of them were military, or military-like voices. What about the normal people? That's what I care about. And with all these voices... they actually all sounded more or less the same. Which is normal since one dude created them all. It just didn't feel like I was reading about real people. Brooks did a good job in making WWZ feel like a real event, something that has actually happened... but the people within it didn't feel like people at all.

And despite the various settings throughout the world, it felt so very Americanised. Even the people in other countries felt so ...well, ultra American,.. and male, and militarised. In fact, many of them were. You see a chapter in the Barbados or Ireland or Austria or whatever, and then it turns out its an American dude just living there. The best (or most memorable) stories in my opinion were the more unusual, less Americanised ones - the blind fighter man in the Japanese forest and the teenage geek climbing down the balconies in urban Japan, the castle defence writer in Europe, the guys up in Space, the downed pilot wandering through New Mexico talking to ghosts, the group on the stolen Chinese sub, and a few others. But most were pretty bland and easy to forget.

And lastly - all those acronyms! So many! Footnotes about fake departments, fake weapons, fake places, fake people - all over the place! A few would be fine, to add authenticity. But so many! It was hard to keep track.

Ultimately, I just felt disengaged and disinterested in the story. It lacked a central story, central character(s) and even a meaningful denouement. I could never read more than maybe 10 or max 20 pages before I put it down again. It was so fragmented, I think that if Brooks had picked the best 3-6 POVs, some in the US, others in Europe, Asia or wherever, gave us just a few characters to care about, and created parallel or interlocking stories that told about WWZ from a few different perspectives, that would have been so much better.