{DNF Review} Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter

Title: Alice in Zombieland
Author: Gena Showalter
Publisher: HarlequinTeen
Series: White Rabbit Chronicles, #1
Release Date: September 25th, 2012
Pages: 404 (Hardcover)
Source: Bought
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

She won’t rest until she’s sent every walking corpse back to its grave. Forever. Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that’s all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone. Her father was right. The monsters are real…. To avenge her family, Ali must learn to fight the undead. To survive, she must learn to trust the baddest of the bad boys, Cole Holland. But Cole has secrets of his own, and if Ali isn’t careful, those secrets might just prove to be more dangerous than the zombies….

Cover Impressions: So achingly gorgeous. It's a shame what's inside is so horrible.

Thoughts: As you can see this is another DNF review, because I can only take so much torture, and reading this was overkill. I made it about 120-something pages, and then I reached my breaking point.

What I Oh So Desperately Wanted: An awesome, zombiefied Alice in Wonderland retelling with lots of action.

What I Got: Crappy, unoriginal, stereotypical teen melodrama.

So we have Alice, a girl who's dad is claimed to be psycho cause he sees these "monsters". And then her whole family gets killed in a car crash with her in it and she mysteriously survives (of course, doesn't sound familiar or unoriginal at all whatsoever). She gets moved into a new school and meets this bad boy who's, and I quote, "serial killer-esque" and she immediately fantasizes about him when they first lock eyes (not kidding).

Okay. So let's start with Cole.

Where do I even begin?

He's the leader of the bad boys in the school. He's extremely gorgeous and muscular with violet eyes and his ex-girlfriend is the bitchy and perfect queen of the school.

Cole is like Patch, Daniel and even friggin Daemon, the father of all YA pricks, all rolled into one. He scowls at Ali when they first meet, and even snaps his teeth at her. What the hell? 

I stopped reading this book by the time Cole became this extremely controlling prick all of a sudden, even to the point of demanding Ali to give him her number. I'm not kidding, folks. I mean, I've read about some pretty controlling YA heroes, but he just takes it to a whole nother level. A Christian Grey level.

The insta-lust was ridiculous. Not five seconds after Ali first locks eyes with him, she's fantasizing about kissing him. Literally. There's, like, whole paragraphs of a makeout scene, all in her head. And then all she thinks about is Cole Cole Cole and how muscular and hot he is.

I stopped liking Ali right about the time she meets Cole. She was so pathetic in front of him, and the fact that after they meet Cole is pretty much the only thing in her mind didn't help at all.

There's also Ali's annoying friend, Kat. She meets her at the hospital cause Kat's mom works there and all she does is talk and talk and gossip and it's so friggin annoying that I wanted to reach into the pages of the book just to slap the shit outta her.

What I'm most most most sad about is of course the faux Alice in Wonderland retelling. The title and the cover (Off with their heads.) and even the name of the series, White Rabbit Chronicles, made me think that this would be an honest-to-god Alice retelling. But no. I guess that was just some method to lure all those fairytale-retelling fanatics out there to pick this book up.

If you are one of those fanatics, as am I, I will tell you this now: This is not an Alice retelling. Save yourselves! D: If you want a good, real YA Alice retelling, try Splintered by A.G. Howard, which I adored. <3

The 120-something pages I read were absolute torture, and there was nothing about this book that made me want to continue reading. It had numerous chances and they were all blown to pieces. Overall, this was your average teen melodrama story with some ghosts and zombies sprinkled onto it. Oh, and Alice in Wonderland references, for whatever reason.

In short, avoid this book at all costs. I definitely learned my lesson. ._. I should have listened to Kat Kennedy's review and took it as a warning.