Twice Shy really turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Not a novel I was planning to read, after all it is a YA novel filled with teenage angst and I had quite enough of that with Twilight and it's sequels. But then I got a free copy of it's sequel, Special Dead, being released in Mid-July and I saw JournalStone was running a special on the e-book copy and figured it might be a good idea to read the first book before reading the second.
The author, Patrick Freivald does an excellent job of keeping the teen in mind and the book is filled with their styles, their language and their life.
The book is packed with the characters you would expect in a novel set in a modern High School. Small-minded administrators, all the usual cliques, bullies, and a new group I had been hearing of, but didn't know much about, emos. For the uninformed, an emo is, well, I suggest you do your own research. It seems the character traits are wide ranging. What one person who is an emo says about what they are differs dramatically from what the next emo has to say about who and what they are. Short answer, they like to dress in dark colors, exhibit traits of depression, but really aren't. They enjoy being called "crazy" and do it for "fun".
Ani Romero is in that group, but she uses it as a cover, you see, Ani is dead, sort of. She carries the ZombieVirus. "She didn't know how she'd contacted the virus - it was believed wiped out in North America over a decade before - and she didn't know why it hadn't turned her into a mindless, brain-eating machine. If her mom knew, she wasn't talking. But the other symptoms necrotized flesh, animal psychosis, dulled sense of taste, touch, and smell - those were in full force."
Her mom, in addition to being the school nurse, spends much of her time treating her daughter with a series of serums and chemical baths all in an effort to find a cure. Even with all of this there are times of stress and other circumstances which make control of her urges difficult.
As the story develops, each reveal is better than the last. This is so much more than a tale of teenage angst with a zombie twist. By the time I got to the final pages I was emotionally drained and when I got to the last page O.M.G. I'm so glad I'll be reading the sequel in a few weeks.
If you haven't read "Twice Shy", go get it. A great read for all ages. Read it before the sequel comes out and then get the sequel. Even though it was published in 2012, it's one of the best stories I've read in 2013.
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