My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a sucker for zombie novels, as y’all know. I’ll take them in all stripes: hardcore creep factor like Sarah Langan, spectacular worldbuilding like Mira Grant, or over the top steampunky goodness like Cherie Priest. I’ll also happily read any zombie novel that aims for funny and/or lighthearted, and I was pleased to see that Jesse Petersen’s Married With Zombies filled that bill nicely.
Our protagonists, Sarah and David, are in the middle of couples counseling when the zombie apocalypse hits–as they discover when they show up for a therapy appointment to find their therapist eating a previous client. Oops. From there, they quickly discover that a zombie outbreak has completely overrun Seattle, and that they are going to have to figure out fast how to not only survive the situation, but put aside their own marital issues while they’re doing it. This is an excellent setup, and it didn’t hurt either that the action started in Seattle, since I’m always a sucker for books set here. (Especially ones involving zombies.) We soon go into a general road trip, though, as Sarah is desperate to find out what happened to her family, and she and David meet the obligatory other parties along the way, all of whom are also struggling to deal with the outbreak–some effectively, some with outright fail, some with genuinely creepy fanaticism.
The book hits all the high points you want in a good ol’ fashioned zombie adventure, though I could have liked a bit more character development for our protagonists–I never got any real feel for why they were having issues to begin with. But then, given that this is pretty much a romantic comedy with zombies, you don’t really need much more than what you get, and I certainly liked this well enough that I’ll be reading more in the series. Three stars.
