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

Unlike your typical zombie apocalypse story, World War Z doesn't ask the question "do they survive?" We know from the very beginning yes, they do. The question instead is "how did they survive?" which makes the concept behind this book fresh and compelling. The author grabs you from the first page and keeps tight pacing, maintaining dramatic tension. However, the author fails critically in character development, in no small part because his own voice and opinions loom so large over the narrative, the characters are never given the chance to become independent, 3-dimensional, fully realized characters.

The book relied heavily on stereotypes and stock characters, which in addition to hampering character development, lent itself to problematic portrayals of non-Western, non-male people. Non-Westerners were frequently treated as corrupt, indoctrinated, cripplingly poor, and/or incompetent, and women in general were very under-represented. I think there were 5 female POVs in the entire book, out of around 30 POV characters, and in the universe of this book, there were no women leaders, doctors, scientists, or intellectuals. There were 2 female soldiers, one of whom prided herself on being not like other women, and the other female characters were a feral child, a former child refugee, and a suburban wife and mother turned refugee. For the most part, they were characters with limited agency, limited contributions, and heavily identified with the civilian refugee experience. The refugee experience in general was feminized, both in terms of who represented that group (women and non-Western males, who have traditionally been feminized in Western literature) in the book and in how refugees were portrayed: weak, irrational, and often getting in the way of those (men) who were trying to help them. There were no women who helped to shape the world before, during or after the war, which for me was a striking absence.

The biggest problem, though, was that the author was very present in the book, and I don't just mean in the figure of the narrator. Rather than having 30 fully developed and individual characters, they honestly felt like 30 facets of the same person telling the story as experienced by one person in 30 different situations. The characters did come from a variety of cultural, religious, political, moral and professional backgrounds, but that fact makes the one-note-ness of their voices and perspectives all the more problematic. The author has a point to make here and instead of nuanced story telling and solid character development, the author's opinions are delivered bluntly with narrative sledgehammers, primarily heavy-handed character/author filibusters which fill almost every page. Authors often write books to make points, but the handling here is very adolescent.

It's worth a read if you want a fast-paced zombie book with a fresh perspective. You may want to pass, though, if you're not really interested in a 200+ page lecture delivered by 30 different poorly developed characters.