I loved this very much! The characters, the actions and even the plot itself! Very inspiring for my own book too!

these were great short stories, the characters were great and I really enjoyed reading them, I liked that it felt different from other books of this type.

This collection of short stories follows the lives of 5 people as they are faced with surviving a "strange" virus that is spreading through town. The stories are entertaining and engaging and my only complaint is that this book was too short!

The Seeds of the Dead was a great quick read. I thoroughly enjoyed the the idea of the book as I do love Zombie type stories and the apocalypse. I would say though at times it did feel rushed, but it is a quick nice read.

Zombie fiction is possibly the most competitive genre right now outside of romance fiction. The Kindle store is full of series and bundles of undead stories, good and bad. The genre was overcrowded before and since the Walking Dead was picked up as a TV show its only got worse. To stand out from the crowd you really need a unique hook, whether it's plot or the setting, and unfortunately there's nothing really in this short book of stories or the snip from the Seed of the Dead at the end that doesn't leave me with a sense of deja vu.

3 stars rounded up from 2.5 average across the stories.

As they were short stories I decided to do a mini review and rating on each of them, rather than the book on the whole as that wouldn't work so well!

Story 1 - 4 stars. I really enjoyed this story, right up to the end where I guessed exactly what was going to happen. I will admit it did spook me though and reminds me why I hate being home alone at night!

Story 2 - 3 stars. I had high hopes after reading the first short but I did not enjoy this one, I thought it was too obvious what was going to happen. I rated it 3 stars because I enjoyed how it connected to the first story and kept that theme going.

Story 3 - 2 stars. Again, I enjoyed how this flowed through from the previous story but the diary aspect was boring and I was kinda confused, the way she was writing was as if it was to her boyfriend not her Mother...

Story 4 - 2 stars. I was disgusted with this one, not in the sense it was horrific or gross, just the way the humans were acting, they were as bad as (if not worse) than those infected. I don't want to give it away so I can't say too much but it super frustrated me.

Story 5 - 1 star. This was the worst of the lot and felt as though it had no structure at all. It appeared to follow the same theme as the previous stories, but it just was not clear in it's story line, I had to re-read the final few paragraphs a few times to actually understand how it was being finished.

Overall, I felt these were a bit of a waste of time, the only thing I really enjoyed was how the same theme flowed through the stories. Other than that, they felt a bit disjointed and at points not clear on their purpose...

This one was definitely not for me. The writing comes off jerky and strange. Everything about it was just off. I tried to keep going after the story of the kid forced to unknowingly eat his brother but when the casual racism started rearing its head, I knew this was a book I would never finish. The story needs a LOT of polishing from sentence structure to spelling and racism is a definite no-no. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

This book... this book is bad. I don't like saying that about a book, but it's outright bad. The entire thing is sexist and there are casual racial slurs thrown in. That alone should be disqualifying for publication.

Additionally, it's poorly written. The sentences themselves are stilted. The dialogue is wooden. Every short story begins with a clumsily handled info dump, usually with zombies playing an incidental role at the end. At its heart, this is not a zombie book. This is the author using zombies as a vehicle to push his social views. One thing that especially irked me was how unnaturally characters handled pain. There would be something like someone speaking in reasoned sentences immediately after having their fingers bitten off. The characters, like the zombies, were simply vehicles. They never felt human.

There are some good ideas here. Writing from the zombie's perspective, for example, and resorting to cannibalism--those are both interesting ideas. They deserve a competent writer. Even the cannibalism thing was handled so ridiculously. The narrator accepted the idea almost immediately and then was game to kill every human she could find. I can't believe I need to say this: most people are reluctant to engage in cannibalism.

Even though reading gory books isn’t my thing I kept reading this page turner. In the beginning I was blown away by the tone and sadness. Then slowly you learn from each chapter what is going on in the world. People desperate for knowledge and others hungry. People trying to get the news globally to understand what is happening. Fear runs, family members have to fight to live. This is a quick read.

I probably shouldn’t have read this during a global pandemic, but oh well. I’m typically not a fan of short stories, but I found most of these interesting. I don’t usually read stuff like this, but I’ll be more open to trying to read more of this genre in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me. The writing style comes across as very “high school creative writing assignment”, or like a Wattpad fanfic, with sentences such as “I decided to plant my soft, full lips onto Trey’s.” Or “Blushing and smiling, I began to giggle as my phone interrupted my wonderful thoughts.” I feel the writing could definitely be improved upon.

This is marketed as a YA novel, but some of the themes etc depicted are very adult and graphic, definitely not suitable to the story.

Please note that this review is my own personal opinion and is not meant as rudeness.

"All who are dead are living and all who live are dead."

Although this collection of stories wasn't bad, and in fact were a honest telling of what really happens during a Zombie epidemic, it missed the mark with me.

To reiterate, I believe this book was very good at what it did. It was a harrowing collection of stories about individuals all mysteriously linked together by the unstoppable marching of the dead in an epidemic sweeping the united states. It was a very realistic approach which had all of the grizzly details and terrible truths that would come to pass during an apocalypse.

However, this was not the book for me. Firstly because, it was advertised to me as Young Adult, and despite this three of the five perspectives were that of grown adults (mostly) with children of their own. I felt like this mix of ages threw me off what I expected to find, and although it could have been forgotten I found it hard to when the two mothers in the story's both had very domestic roles and were barely part of any kind of action. Building on this, I did go in expecting this to be a action-packed book as akin to the cover, and instead found a collection of stories with very minimal action mostly talking about their worry for parents who had gone off into fight the epidemic, or familial disputed between characters.

Secondly, once again passing back to how it was marketed at me, as YA, I found the content of the book to be a bit too dark for this genre. There was a good deal of very mature topics such as the discussion of rape, suicide, coldblooded murder and a grisly depiction of cannibalism which although usually doesn't faze me, it was troubling because of the age it was being aimed at. These are the qualities of something I would see in a movie theatre labelled 18. And because this is YA, which is mostly aimed at 12-17 year olds, I felt it was a little too gory for something you would want a kid from middle-school or early high-school picking up. This would have been fine if only the age demographic had been adjusted slightly, to feature the adult protagonists within the story.

Although this wasn't a bad book, I feel like its target demographic was off, and it wasn't the kind of thing I was expecting or looking for. The writing was intriguing, but I did at times feel unable to connect to the characters, which complicated the ability to accept the grown adult perspectives I was trying to understand.