You Are So UNDEAD To Me --Book Review

You Are So UNDEAD To Me
By: Stacy Jay
Published by: Razorbill

Front of the book: Black background with grass. Teen-aged female figure from just under the chest down, with hands on
hips. Wears red and pink striped sleeveless top, cutoff jeans shorts, and red, white, blue, and yellow sneakers. Tongue of sneakers has a yellow lightning bolt. Right wrist bears three cream-beaded bracelets, and there is a skull-and-crossbones ring on the second finger of the right hand. Right foot is raised and resting on a human skull.

Back of the book:

Q: HOW MANY ZOMBIES DOES IT TAKE TO RUIN A SOCIAL LIFE?

A: NOT MANY.

“Megan Berry is a Zombie Settler by birth, which means she’s
part-time shrink to a whole bunch of semi-dead people with killer issues. All Megan really wants is to go to homecoming, but when you’re trailed by a bunch of slobbering corpses whenever you leave the house, it’s kinda hard to score a date. Let’s just say Megan’s love life could use some major resuscitation.

“Megan’s convinced her life can’t get any worse –until
someone in school starts using black magic to turn average, angsty Undead into scary, hardcore flesh-eating Zombies.
Now it’s up to Megan to stop the Zombie apocalypse. Her life –and more importantly, the homecoming dance—depends on it.”


I have only just begun reading this book, but already I can
see parallels to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. First off, Megan’s a high-school girl –a sophomore, in fact. Second, she is having to deal with the Undead. Third, she’s a reluctant Zombie
Settler. Unlike Buffy, however, her interaction with Zombies is not to destroy them, but to help them. Her job is to help the recently-deceased cope with their death, and deal with the issues keeping them from resting.

Being a Zombie Settler is a “family business” –her mother
was a Zombie Settler. Megan began when she was five years old, dealing with Zombie children. (Zombie Settlers deal with Undead their own age.) To aid her, she has several powers, spells spoken in Latin, much like the magic in Harry Potter.

Zombies in the book –or the “normal” ones, anyway—are
intelligent, can talk, and all they want is to have their problem solved so they can go back to their grave. Megan
tells us that the “Walking Dead kind of Zombies are totally bogus” –they don’t eat flesh or brains. Only the “Reanimated Undead” eat flesh, but not brains. (This makes me wonder where Billy Butcherson (of Hocus Pocus) might come in. Since he was brought back by a magic spell, he might fall into the “Reanimated Undead” category, but he is really more like the “normal” Zombies.)

There is an evil Zombie Settler, as well. Or, at least, a “skanky” one: Monica Parsons. In fact, Megan’s first “client” after several years of inactivity is a young man who used to date –and was dumped—by Monica. Megan thinks about how ironic it would be if he had showed up at Monica’s door.

I found the book in the Young Readers section at Wal-Mart. It is a paperback that cost me $7.57.