Zombies vs Unicorns edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier
I'm curious how the paperback cover works since the hardcover book here has the black dust jacket with cut-outs of a zombie and a unicorn which can be removed to show a mural of unicorns and zombies fighting each other printed onto the book cover itself. I think the dust jacket idea is clever although I'm not that fond of the art style used for the images themselves, it's a neat idea regardless however.
Summary: Originating from a debate in the comments of author Justin
Larbalestier's blog, she and Holly Black head up this anthology which
compare zombies and unicorns with 12 stories from well known young adult
authors who try to prove why their side is better.
The Good: I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that not
every story in the anthology involved romance, I simply like a break from it
sometimes, and that there were two LGTB romances in the anthology as well
(oddly enough both zombies, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Alaya Dawn Johnson and "Inoculata" by Scott Westerfeld), a very nice change of pace
overall. There are some stories in here which I’m confused if they were written
to be parodies (all unicorn stories, Meg Cabot’s "Princess Prettypants" and Naomi Novik's "Purity Test")*
but they ended up being so genuinely hilarious that in the end I ended up not
caring, I had fun reading them. Fun actually sums up a lot of the anthology,
given my bad track record with anthologies I really wasn’t expecting much out
of this one yet I enjoyed it and can see why so many other people have as well.
The Bad: I’m simply not a big fan of dystopias, for reasons that
deserve their own post someday, and since a number of the zombie stories were
set in dystopias I didn’t like them as much (which may sound harsh but as I’ve
said before, it’s not plot but setting that’s the most important part of a
story for me and that’s extra true with such stories like these). None of the
stories were bad however, there were just some not to my taste and only about half of them stuck in my mind only a month after I read them which speaks volumes on it's own.
Probably the best anthology I've tried in the past few years but since it had been at least six months between whatever my last anthology was an the Mars one that's not as grand a statement as it sounds. Not sure if I would want a copy of my own for rereading but I'd certainly recommend this to many of my friends, it's a fun book with variety that I can see appealing to a lot of people.
*so
zombies do romance and unicorns do comedy? No wonder I like unicorns better
