Book Review: Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

High school is hard. Teens have to worry about the clothes they wear, the friends they have, the groups they join. And now? in the world of Dan Waters's Generation Dead, they also have to worry about returning from the grave and grossing out all their peers.

In Generation Dead, American teenagers are learning to adjust to a new reality: some kids who die during their teen years are rising again as zombies (er, make that "living impaired"). As this teen drama unfolds, living and undead teens alike try to adjust to life together. The undead teens have a hard time of it, for several reasons. First of all, they don't come back to a full life like the one they left; the living impaired have difficulty with motor skills and verbal communication. Meanwhile, the fact that they are the walking dead kind of creeps out some of their classmates, who go to great lengths to torture them and even attempt to kill them a second time. Meanwhile, some of the living teens try to find a way to accept their "differently biotic" friends into their circles, and of course face prejudice themselves for doing so.

I enjoyed the plot lines involving the living teens. It was interesting to see them struggle with the status quo of high school and how they were going to accept new kids without committing social suicide themselves. The plotlines involving the zombie kids, however, were somewhat lacking. After a while their painstaking speech patterns (chock full of elipses) grew extremely tiring to read, and their characters were 2-dimensional at best. The only really interesting part about their portion of the novel was seeing how their friends and families reacted to their returns from the grave (some were welcomed home with open arms, others were disowned).

Generation Dead left enough unanswered questions and unresolved plot lines to make way for a sequel. In May 2009, Waters published Generation Dead: Kiss of Life. I may eventually read it, but I'm certainly not dying to do it.