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Mira Grant

Start date: April 7, 2016

Finish date: May 7, 2016

Discussion: Monthly Bookclub Read

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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
By Sparrow Knigh… · 1 post · 12 views

last updated Mar 12, 2016 05:12AM

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Nov 01, 2013 Joe rated it really liked it

This book constantly surprised me - I almost gave up on it, every 30 pages or so, and yet, every time I was at the point of hurling it across the room in fury, author Mira Grant came up with another unexpected plot twist, and I gave her another chance.
Having said that, despite having all the trappings of postapocalyptic zombie horror, this is not a book about zombies. They're almost incidental to the storyline, an inconvenience, much like jet-lag, or sunburn, or overpriced coffee. It is a book, This book constantly surprised me - I almost gave up on it, every 30 pages or so, and yet, every time I was at the point of hurling it across the room in fury, author Mira Grant came up with another unexpected plot twist, and I gave her another chance.
Having said that, despite having all the trappings of postapocalyptic zombie horror, this is not a book about zombies. They're almost incidental to the storyline, an inconvenience, much like jet-lag, or sunburn, or overpriced coffee. It is a book, more or less, about journalism, and freedom of the press, and for that reason has been much compared to Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. For my part, although I can see the similarity, the connection didn't really stand up. Possibly that's because Larsson made his journalist a middle-aged man whereas Grant made hers a teenage girl, but otherwise the two are essentially interchangeable - government conspiracies, social misfits, and back-room deals across all levels of the social strata.

A writer whose work I would say this is similar to is Margaret Atwood, particularly her MaddAddam trilogy. Mira Grant applies the same techniques as Atwood, although almost using them in the opposite way - whereas in Margaret Atwood's future reality, everything has a sort of life, and a kind of animism pervades her busy human interaction with all these entities, in Mira Grant's world, it is as though nothing has life, and even the human characters barely have agency. Despite this opposition of worldviews, both writers have created characters that interact with reality as an extension of them. Margaret Atwood's characters know their world, because it is alive, and they are alive, and they can thus empathize with it. Mira Grant's characters know their world, because it has function and utility, and contributes to their function and utility, and therefore they can incorporate its function into their activity. Personally, I prefer Margaret Atwood's soaring vistas to Mira Grant's dusty, grimy cityscapes, but each has its place - they showcase each other's strengths.

Finally, the other writer that comes to mind on reading this story is Australian novelist John Marsden, whose Tomorrow, When the War Began books transformed young adult literature in Australia when they were published. John Marsden, who started his story in the 1990s, supplies the characterization and urgency of setting that dominates this story. Though he was writing about teenagers whose country is attacked by a foreign power and who are driven into hiding, making only occasional guerilla raids for supplies or to disrupt the occupying troops, his characters see the world the same way as the protagonists of Mira Grant's story - the same paranoia pervades both. The only different is, whereas John Marsden's work presents an ensemble of characters, each with different things to contribute to the struggle, Mira Grant's is essentially a one-man-show - Georgia Mason, with the infrequent interruption of her brother or the outside world, tells her story and presents the news, and hers is the only voice we are given. ...more

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May 19, 2012 Heather rated it it was amazing

Mira Grant gives a solid, science-based, take on the shambling undead that I found very satisfying. The world she presents is one of the not too distant future, a time after "The Rising" once humanity has fought back against the plague of undead and regained some sort of normalcy, a degree of safety provided by hyper-security, heavy weaponry and constant blood tests to prove each and every person entering any area is infection-free.

I want to be careful not to spoil anything here so I will be br ...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Cc rated it liked it

* 3.5 stars *

Where to start? Well first off this book was not at all what I was expecting. I love horror and zombie stories; stories that keep me awake at night and make me run from my car to my door because of a probable zombie encounter. Half way through this book I would say it was anitclimactic and that it rambled on with painfilly long descriptions of unimportant futuristic technology. That was before I read the final hundred pages. I'm not going to include any spoilers because that would j ...more

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