Not Dead Enough by Mina Carter

Hello everyone,

The hero is a zombie! You all know I love zombie based romances, I blame The Walking Dead, but I’ve never read one where the hero was a zombie. Therefore I couldn’t resist reading Not Dead Enough by Mina Carter.

The book:

Brett Perkins was a soldier until the Project killed him. Now he's finding that life after death isn't so hot. With the Project base destroyed, he and his team have been tasked with running down and destroying a group of rogue Bloods. Unfortunately the vampires always seem to be one step ahead. Then they start kidnapping women...

Thanks to her soon-to-be ex-husband, Julia Collier is despised and reviled in the small town of Greenwood. His stories have painted her as everything from an air-headed gold-digger to a nymphomaniac serial killer. She can't even shop in the local store without suffering abuse from her fellow townsfolk, and that's before the late night calls or her ex's bully-boys following her.

When her home is broken into Julia assumes it's her husband making good on his threats to 'deal with her for good'. She never dreams that it will lead a descent into another, terrifying world. One inhabited by werewolves, vampires... and zombies. Or that zombies could be so damn hot. Especially one certain example who makes her heart pound and all her common sense disappear over the horizon. After all, what woman in her right mind would fall for the undead?

My thoughts:

Why couldn’t this book be longer! It was one of those books that I couldn’t stop reading but didn’t want to finish. Mina Carter has reinvented the zombie, making them hotter, stronger and faster; instead of the sluggish brain-eating monsters of popular culture. Brett and his friends were part of a top-secret government project but have since gone rogue and are now hunting down a group of Bloods (vampires) that are kidnapping women. Our heroine Julia is one of these kidnapped women but manages to escape and runs straight into the arms of Brett.

“Electricity arced between them at the first touch of her fingers. He gasped, the air snatched from his lungs as the darkness, the non-human part of him that craved blood and death, surged forward as though pulled towards her’.

Love in the time of the Dead by Tera Shanley

Hey everyone,

The book:

Laney Landry has been fighting Deads alongside her brother and friends for three years. But she has a secret. She’s immune to Dead bites and has to find the right people to trust with the information. Her team rallies around her to find a doctor who can extract a vaccine from Laney which could fight the virus that ended the world. 

Sean Daniels leads a colony that provides her team with much needed shelter and supplies. He is obviously interested in Laney. The question is whether he’s only intrigued by her as a source for the possible vaccine, or for something more. Tests for the cure might push her body beyond what it can endure, and just as she faces a ghost from her past, her longtime teammate Derek Mitchell hints at an interest in more than just her Dead slaying abilities. 

Two honorable and alluring men -- one colossal decision to make. Despite historically bad taste in men, can she rise above the chaos of the apocalypse and choose the one who deserves her heart? The right choice could mean the difference between surviving…and just living.

My Thoughts:

First things first, I LOVE this cover! It is one of the most beautifully artistic covers I’ve seen for a zombie based romance in ages. In fact it was the cover that first attracted me to this novel and I’m so glad I ended up buying it, it was quite simply perfect for me.

In theory I shouldn’t have liked it, as I normally hate, and avoid, books that offer the reader two men that the heroine could be romantically interested in. Yet something inside told me to give this book ago, partly because I loved the concept; as mentioned in a previous post I currently love zombie, apocalyptic based romances. One of the reasons I loved this book was due to the main character of Laney, she was feisty, determined, sarcastic but also loyal to those she loved. One of my favourite lines from Love in the time of the Dead was Laney talking about her ex Adam:

Dystopian Romance Books

Hello readers,

Now if you’ve been reading romance for a while you’ve probably noticed that there are defined tropes or themes that authors and readers return to again and again. Now although this sounds like a bad thing it really isn’t and in fact one of my favourite things to do is binge on a trope. At the moment I’m obsessed with dystopian, apocalypse, zombie style romances, basically anything were society, as we know it has crumbled or broken down. Obviously this is an extremely popular style of book at the moment, particularly within the young adult genre. I blame the Hunger Games trilogy.

In this post I’m going to talk about my favourite romance novels that incorporate this theme, some of them are quite well known and if you’ve read them I loved to hear your thoughts. This is not, of course an exhaustive list as that would take forever, but instead a small selection that show the diversity of this trope. I hope that you will like the following post and now let’s get started.

I’m going to begin with the most well known book on my list, which is The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook.

Now I know some of you would be reluctant to call The Iron Duke a dystopian romance and while I agree that it does sit more comfortably in the world of steampunk, I still believe that this is a story about a society in crisis, or at least one recovering from crisis. The first novel in the extremely popular Iron Seas Series The Iron Duke introduces the reader into an England that has been destroyed by Horde control, the majority of people were enslaved and could be turned into mindless drones with little or no free-thought due to the use of nanobots. Not only is this a country recovering from Horde control it is also part of a world that is suffering from zombie infestation with most of Africa and Europe being a dangerous wasteland.