Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Cool cover, huh?  And yet it doesn't quite fit any of the characters in the book.  But that is a small point when you end up with a cover that's attractive, eye-catching, and mysterious.  I understand first time authors don't get much input on the cover, and Mr. Waters certainly  seems pleased, judging by the funny post on his blog.  

This book has one of the most original premises I've seen lately. Some dead teenagers are coming back to life, for no reason the medical establishment has gotten a grip on yet.  In the meantime, their families have to decide what to do with them. Those who have recently come back to life have difficulty speaking, have cold dead skin, no heart beat, but still have the character of their former selves.  The setting is a high school that has a high percentage of dead kids going to school there; prejudice is high.  Phoebe, the main character, becomes intrigued with one of her dead fellow students, and trouble follows. 

This was well written and intriguing enough that I sped through it.  The main characters are engaging and easy to care for.  It is in third person limited point of view, but from multiple chracters.  That is, you're only in one character's head at a time, but you get into quite a few heads.  The only problem I had with this was that sometimes their thoughts don't have a different enough feel to them.  They all think with pretty much the same vocabulary.  At one point, the bully thinks to himself that his former friend has developed a lot of poise over the summer.  "Poise" was so distracting to me that I bounced out of the story and sat there for several minutes wondering if the story wasn't maybe in third person omniscient so that everyone's thoughts were really supposed to be filtered through a god-like narrator.  I'm thinking this is a nit-picky thing only a word-obsessed person like a writer or English teacher might find distracting, though, because clearly when you're in the bully's head there are way more pressing issues than his vocabulary choice.  

Since I'm being annoyingly picky, though . . . there is a lot of skipping in this book.  (Anything more than three is a lot, right?)  Maybe the author means it metaphorically to show his female characters arriving or leaving in a bubbly, enthusiastic manner.  Maybe he has a better acquaintance with high schoolers than I do, and there's more skipping than I think there is.  It was a little distracting.

Anyway, it's different from most of what's out there, and worth a look just for that.  I would think those that have enjoyed Stephenie Meyers would smoke through this while waiting for her next installment and feel lucky to have it.

(PG-13/R: violence, language, sexual thoughts.  The violence that happens in the book is not "R" graphic, but the intention is there in a character's thoughts.  If we saw everything that happened, it would be R.)