Review: The Other Life

The Other Life by Suzanne Winnacker

Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Publication Date (USA): May 15th 2012
Pages: 261
Source: Library
Genre: Dystopian, Romance, Zombie Apocalypse
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3 years, 1 month, 1 week and 6 days since I’d seen daylight. One-fifth of my life.

Sherry and her family have lived sealed in a bunker in the garden since things went wrong up above. Her grandfather has been in the freezer for the last three months, her parents are at each other’s throats and two minutes ago they ran out of food.

Sherry and her father leave the safety of the bunker and find a devastated and empty LA, smashed to pieces by bombs and haunted by ‘Weepers’ - rabid humans infected with a weaponized rabies virus.

While searching for food in a supermarket, Sherry’s father disappears and Sherry is saved by Joshua, a boy-hunter. He takes her to Safe-haven, a tumble-down vineyard in the hills outside LA, where a handful of other survivors are picking up the pieces of their ‘other lives’. As she falls in love for the first time, Sherry must save her father, stay alive and keep Joshua safe when his desire for vengeance threatens them all.

The Other Life is a very interesting book with a really neat concept. The book takes place in Dystopian California in a world were a "rabies" virus has been spreading through the southwest United States. To take shelter from this virus people were forced to find refuge in public or private bunkers to wait out the cure for this epidemic. After three years of living in a private bunker with her family, Sherry's family has run out of food, and she and her father have to go out and find food.

To me, this book had a lot of similar qualities to the book Breathe by Sarah Crossen. Like Breathe, The Other Life was a story with a general idea that and setting that completely sucked me in and gave me an amazing vision of what this world would be like. What really made this book, was not the characters (though they are awesome too) but it was the well written and described setting and well thought out plot that made me wonder what could possibly be going on.

There was a relationship in this book between Sherry and a boy name Joshua, it wasn't too bad, though there was the subtle tinge of insta-love. Instead of love it more felt like "Hey, you're the first guy my age I've seen in three years, let's make out." But even with that... I did notice what might be attractive about Joshua, and he might even be an interesting guy in a normal world.

Throughout the story Sherry, who narrates the story, is very obsessed with time and how long it has been since she has been above ground. I understand how that would be an interesting way to start a story, but Sherry seems to obsess over amounts of time and it gets pretty annoying after the first two chapters. I really just wanted yell at Sherry to shut up sometimes because time amounts were brought up so often.