Quick Take - Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

I find myself at a crossroads with this book.  I can see why it was kind of a big deal when it was coming out, but at the same time I feel like it's a retread of a lot of what's already out there.  Basically, the main character is out in the woods when an electromagnetic pulse sweeps across, presumably, the world or at least North America (this is yet to be fully resolved and probably a nonpoint really in terms of what the story is currently trying to do).  A bunch of people die, some people get sort of super powers (radioactive spider, anyone?), a bunch become zombies, and others just basically survive for whatever reason which is kind of explained but not fully and gets to be kind of annoying as the main character keeps trying to figure it out.  So, Alex, our main character, manages to meet up with some other survivors and then finally ends up in a whole settlement of people trying to get on with life.

My big issues come from the whole 'this feels familiar' aspect of the story.  For one, it's zombies.  World War Z does zombies better than any other book I've read and there are obvious comparisons if you've read both.  For two, characters are generally type cast.  The dictator preacher guy of Rule (the super closed off settlement Alex finds herself in) is always the dictator preacher guy of Rule.  Chris and Tom are obviously the set up love interests to pull Alex into a weird love triangle where one or all of them is always somewhere else the others aren't.  The whiny eight year old is always the whiny eight year old.  Parsed out, the little things of the book look like they've literally been plucked from other sources and dropped in with minor rewrites.

While the premise of the story is decent enough, I feel that with the influx of zombie works that have hit the market, Ashes falls short of what some of the other works have been able to do.  Bick's novel does not feel nearly original enough when it should.  The one thing I did enjoy, maybe 'cause it kept me up after reading this book later at night, was the description.  The gross level of some of the descriptions is very well done and detailed, disturbingly so.  However, the dialogue tends to fail by being overly used when explaining things or not, and the cliches prominent in both plot and character lowered this book in my esteem.

Read if you're a fan of zombie novels, otherwise I cannot give this a glowing recommendation.  Avoid Me.