Sick | Tom Leveen | Review

Sick | Tom Leveen | Review

• Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Sick starts out as your average YA novel, where its just another day at high school for Brian and his friends. However when some of the students and staff are affected by a disease outbreak that causes them to turn into zombies Brian is determined to formulate a plan to track down sister Kenzie and (ex) girlfriend Laura before its too late.

The story of Sick takes place over just one day starting out with several chapters of the ‘mundane’. Although there are lots of hints towards an outbreak and the introduction of zombies – deserted roads, chaos at the hospitals etc - it isn’t until around 20% of the way through that this main storyline really kicks in.

Whilst I was enjoying the read I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing, perhaps the element of surprise. The plot is fairly typical of a zombie story with our trapped group of survivors trying to figure out a plan to make it out alive and whilst I wanted to love it I couldn’t find anything particularly special or unique about the story. The key to this type of book is keeping the reader engaged and invested in the main character’s journey, and yes I did want to see whether Brian and co would manage to escape, however I also didn’t find the outcome a surprise. Personally I was also very intrigued to find out what would happen to the group if they did manage to escape the school grounds and just what would be waiting on the other side of the wall. Sadly there is no time for this to be explored within the short length of this book, nor is there much of an explanation behind how the disease came to be which I thought was a shame.

The dialogue was something else that I didn’t love as to me it didn’t always feel overly realistic. I should probably mention at this point that there is a fair amount of swearing throughout the book as well as some gore due to the ‘zombie’ element, worth noting as both of which I’m sure may not appeal to some readers.

Despite these issues there was definitely something intriguing about this book and all things considered I actually did enjoy this quick read, although it didn’t completely win me over. If you’re looking for a good little zombie book that follows the classic formula then this might be the one for you. Sick definitely wasn’t a bad read, but unfortunately for me it wasn’t a great one either.

*Review copy via Netgalley