Allison Hewitt Is Trapped by Madeleine Roux

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"One woman's story as she blogs - and fights back - the zombie apocalypse"

Allison Hewitt and her five colleagues at the Brooks and Peabody Bookstore are trapped together when the zombie outbreak hits. Allison reaches out for help through her blog, writing on her laptop and utilizing the military's emergency wireless network (SNET). It may also be her only chance to reach her mother. But as the reality of their situation sinks in, Allison's blog becomes a harrowing account of her edge-of-the-seat adventures (with some witty sarcasm thrown in) as she and her companions fight their way through ravenous zombies and sometimes even more dangerous humans.

I wanted to love this book, truly I did, but I am sad to say that it did not live up to my expectations. It starts off pretty well - Allison and her coworkers are trying to survive the zombie apocalypse locked in their bookstore break room, but soon they eventually decide to seek greener pastures elsewhere (Allison also hopes that moving elsewhere will help reunite her with her mother). I liked that the main protagonist had a lot of spunk, and since she was a journalist of sorts who had short blonde hair, I could not help but picture her as played by Allison Mack, since she shared a lot of qualities with Chloe from Smallville.

Almost the whole book is told in Allison's perspective, as she blogs about her adventures through a mysterious WiFi network called 'SNET.' There are also comments at the end of each post, some from regulars and others from one-time visitors to the blog, which was neat. What I found hard to believe, however, was that the blog posts were actually blog posts - they read like chapters in a novel, and it was highly unlikely that Allison would have been able to write out posts in as much detail as she had. And while the characters were interesting enough, they really weren't believable at all - almost all of them were stereotyped.

Don't get me wrong, there were some pretty good action scenes in here, but I think that they would have been better had there been stronger writing to back them up. It didn't help that any moment of suspense was quickly quenched by the realization that Allison was writing about it, and thus must have survived it. The end seemed especially choppy to me, and I even felt as though Allison had deviated a lot from her character with no apparent reason as to why. With so many good ratings on Goodreads, I had really expected something a lot better, and was sadly disappointed. There was potential in the plot line, but it was never realized, so I'll give it 2 out of 5 stars.