Tuesday 15 May 2012

Ninja Verses Pirate Featuring Zombies Review

Ninja Verses Pirate Featuring Zombies (How To End Human Suffering 1)
-       James Marshall
Publisher: Chizine Publications
E-Arc Received Courtesy of netgalley and Chizine Publications
In a world where Zombies control banks and governments, only one young man sees the way things are and emerges from the Chaos and destruction: Guy Boy Man. While he tries to end human suffering worldwide and in his high school, Guy Boy Man meets a cute Pink-Haired girl named Babydoll15 who has a Unicorn that follows her everywhere. An Epic Romance begins, but forces Beyond Their Control are intent on keeping the young couple apart. One of those Forces may - or may not be! - Guy Boy Man's closest friend, a handsome African-American Ninja named Sweetie Honey; another could be four Exotically Beautiful, genetically engineered and behaviorally modified Eastern European Girls; yet another, the principal of their High School ...not to mention an impending standardized test known as the Zombie Acceptance Test! Will Guy Boy Man find a way to be with Baby Doll15 in a World Where Everyone Is Doomed to become either zombies or zombie food?

It took me a long time to read this book. I even put it down and read a few other books before I finished it (something unheard of for me as I like to just focus on one book at a time!). I requested this book thanks to the title –  Ninja Verses Pirate Featuring Zombies...of course, I wanted to read it! However, I really struggled with this book.
It is written in first person by our ‘hero’ Guy Boy Man and as such is close to a stream of consciousness with rambling asides and clever word play, but this makes it very difficult to follow. Two pages will go by as a he digresses on a series of episodes about how horrible humans are before returning to the conversation in high school that he was having. I found this very hard to focus and meant that my concentration wandered nearly as much as Guy Boy Mans.
For some time I was intrigued as to whether the zombies and troubled teens were real or just one guys interpretation of society today. This idea kept me reading for a while as I continued to translate the happenings into ‘real’ world, but after a while this wore a little thin. There are some funny lines in here but you have to dig through a lot to find them and it’s a lot of effort. To be honest this felt like a lot of work to read and I don’t know if I could recommended it to anyone else.
2 out of 10 (for a few funny lines and a great title only!)

3 comments:

  1. you're right the topic sounds interesting, I'm sorry it wasn't for you, well I think it's not for me either.

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  2. OOO, don't you hate it in the books when hero does have an endless inner monologue during the conversation! I've read a few books like that and always struggled to get into them :) I would really recommend The Peculiar Superpowers of Eleanor Armstrong by K.A. Shloegel as a similar book - a zombie invasion book, but it's a book about a teen writing a book about a zombie invasion, and it's hilarious :) Great review, and Oh! Your book just came through from Amazon, so thank you, I'm over the moon! ;)

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  3. Aw... too bad this one just didn't work. Reading should be fun and not work. However, I agree that the title rocks. LOL

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