musing for fun – caeblogs

I’m terrified of zombies. I don’t just mean zombies in the fictional context, I mean the idea of our real life planet Earth one day being consumed by toxic fumes which rots our brains and turn us into dribbling cannibals. Okay, I know it sounds irrational (I get funny stares whenever I admit this to people) but it’s a fear I’ve had since I first watched Night of The Living Dead many, many years ago and I’ve never known how to shake it. I even had nightmares after watching Shaun of the Dead (don’t laugh). As you can imagine, now I make it a rule to watch as few zombie movies as I can.

So when I had a book trilogy about necromancy recommended to me by a friend, I shocked myself by ordering all three of them. We share the same taste in fiction so I figured that they had to be okay (having over 100,000 ratings collectively on Goodreads didn’t hurt either). Was I surprised? Oh, yes! Very pleasantly so. The first in the series was released a couple of years before the  Harry Potter madness consumed the world so I’d seen a few reviewers comparing the two series online but after reading them, I realised they are nothing alike. This series is much darker, funnier and was enjoyable for me. And the best part? Pure adventure with very little romance thrown in. It was really refreshing to read a book written about teenagers/for teenagers that had female protagonists who weren’t obsessed with finding love. I got some stick about The Other Slipper not having much romance in it and I was starting to doubt my decision to cut out the love story I had planned initially for Jo, but after reading this series, I felt much better about my choice. Oh and I loved that Gareth Nix was not afraid to head hop as much as he wanted (take that “head hopping police”! Kapow!). I’ve been told off by some reviewers for doing this but if multimillion dollar bestselling authors Gareth Nix and Alexander McCall Smith can do it, why can’t Kenechi Udogu? Continue reading →