Starting off strong, this book was fun, entertaining and gory all at once. I really enjoyed Kesta as a character and sympathised with her and her grief. However, around the 60% mark I found myself losing interest. The plot seemed to drag and Kesta’s actions became irrational and irritating. The medical jargon was interesting and I thought the virus itself was genius, how it mutated and grew. But the cure was found seemingly quickly with no repercussions or real world effects. This was a book of two halves, some it was clever and entertaining whereas other parts were boring and unnecessary.

A weirdly beautiful story about the lengths you will go to for the ones you love. Gave big big pandemic vibes and the descriptions of gross zombie stuff satisfied the zombie itch without being too body horror.

In the midst of a zombie pandemic, Kesta has to hide her husband's situation as a secret.
While not all the plot points added up, added to the story, or intrigued me, I was drawn into this book because I found it witty!
I liked the underlying humour and the subtexts - it is a book where you can find many different layers, and either enjoy the surface level story, which is engaging, or perhaps find some more gems in it like I did.
3.5 stars rounded up because of its high potential.

This was wonderful! Thoroughly enjoyed and thought it was very unique in its take. Devastatingly sad at times, but overall hopeful regarding humanity.

One Yellow Eye follows Kesta who has her husband Tim chained to her bed...because he's a zombie and she isn't prepared to let him go just yet until she finds a cure.

An intriguing premise which felt like a cross between the Walking Dead (especially the episode where they are trapped in the CDC lab) and an unusual rom com.

I really enjoyed Kesta's discovery on how the virus came about which was fascinating and a little scary as to how easily these things can potentially happen.

This was a claustrophobic read, only really set in two places, Kesta's apartment or the lab. This added to the darkness and really showed how Kesta was spiralling out of control.

I'm not sure how I would have liked it to end, but it felt a little flat for me and I think I was expecting more of a gut punch to hit me with all the emotions but it just never came.

What would you do if there was a zombie apocalypse and your partner was bitten? Well Kesta decides to keep her husband, Tim, safely handcuffed to their spare bed while she tries to find a cure. Sounds like a difficult task, luckily Kesta works at the public hospital in just the right field of work to find something that might cure Tim. In the meantime she'll try anything she can get her hands on, even if it is locked away, in her NHS laboratory.

This is a story about love, hope, grief and desperation with a generous dollop of British stiff upper lip and dark humour. Set in London after a zombie pandemic has been cleaned up and life is beginning to go back to normal, but will it ever be the same?

3.5 I was really excited to dive into this one, hoping for something unique, fun, and punchy like The Last One At The Party. While it offered some fresh explanation and lore about zombies, it was much slower and more sad than I was expecting based on the blurb and cover, which suggests some degree of humour and fiasco.

It’s gonna be tricky to talk about this in detail without spoilers. All possible spoilers have been removed here but are hidden in spoiler tags in my links.

What worked for me:
🧟‍♀️ I liked that the author didn’t (re)use COVID-19 pandemic language: this is something I notice a lot in fiction (I am not someone who enjoys reading about the recent pandemic in fiction) and appreciated the use of alternative/different language (curfew, infected, etc.)
🧟‍♀️ The sense of claustrophobia between the apartment and the lab was well done.
🧟‍♀️ I really liked the fresh take on the virus origin! It felt new while also being plausible.
🧟‍♀️ I appreciated that the infected had physical limitations (too often they’re portrayed as super fast, indestructible, with super human strength which doesn’t seem realistic).
🧟‍♀️ While her characterization wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped, I noticed Kesta’s development arc.

What I wasn’t so keen on:
🧟‍♀️ The characters never really got out of second gear for me. I get that Kesta loved Tim but all we see is her desperate attachment. We don’t really explore their history, connection, or what their 19 year marriage was like (until this was revealed, I thought they’d been together for mere months? We jump from an incomplete how-they-met interlude to glossing over basically the entire pre-infection relationship). I also didn’t understand her actions: we kept hearing about how devoted she was to Tim but she was constantly risking his safety and getting caught by going out for meals, keeping irregular hours, being drunk all the time. 
Similarly, I didn’t feel a strong connection between Jess and Kesta. Jess annoyed me as a character: she was vacuous, needy, and didn’t understand boundaries. The characters that did show complexity: Cooke, Dudley, and the lab manger, were firmly relegated to ‘side characters’ and every single one of their relationships to the main character was trope-y and predictable.
🧟‍♀️ Despite Kesta’s best efforts, she has incredible luck and timing. I felt that a lot of the stupid situations she got herself into were only resolved with sheer dumb luck or parking established characterization when it was convenient for plot purposes.
🧟‍♀️ I didn’t like reading about the animal testing.

About the ending…
There's no good way to end a book like this where a binary yes/no is basically the only way forward. <spoilers removed>

There were a lot of outstanding questions that distracted me throughout the book and after I'd finished. <spoilers removed>