Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (Zombie #1) by Madeleine Roux

Allison Hewitt was hard at work in a bookstore when the zombie apocalypse broke out.  Now she's trapped in the store room with her boss, a few coworkers and a couple of the store's regular customers. For now, things seem okay because they have a few supplies but Allison knows that they cannot afford to stay in the store room.  As she and her compatriots look for someplace safe to live, Allison cannot stop thinking of her mother who has cancer.  When Allison learns that her mother may have moved on to a place called Liberty Village, Allison must choose between staying with her fellow survivors or heading out on her own to find her mother.

What drove me to read Allison Hewitt Is Trapped, is the fact that the book is written in a series of blog posts.  For me, this amounted to a unique device to tell a story.  Unfortunately, the blog concept didn't really work and left me wondering if Roux had actually read a blog?  If you are writing a blog post about something which happened, it should read like a recollection and not like the events are current. Furthermore, writing about past events should evoke some kind of personal introspection which these supposed posts were absolutely lacking.  The only way in which Roux stayed true to the blog format was by having comments at the end of each entry.  The comments became the only real representation of a blog post; however, they also served to pull me out of the story because they included brief snippets from what I would call less than side characters and their peril.

It has to be said, Allison's ability to keep her laptop safe and continue to find free wifi to post as the world falls apart really made no sense to me whatsoever.  Why would someone prioritize this as a form of record keeping in a zombie apocalypse?

Chick-lit is a guilty pleasure of mine but after reading Allison Hewitt Is Trapped, I'm not sure that it lends itself well to a dystopain zombie setting. The very nature of a zombie apocalypse means darkness and suffering juxtaposed to Allison's upbeat attitude really felt at odds; it made this apocalypse seem so sanitized.  I was particularly irked by Allison's love life.  She doesn't know if her mother is alive or dead, is fighting for food and shelter, yet somehow she manages to fall in love with an older married man.  Given the threat to her life and safety, am I really supposed to find her drama as the other woman believable or even interesting? Every time Allison went on about how much she hated Collin's wife, I couldn't help but shake my head. Who the hell would be worrying about this shit now? Worse still, Allison stopped just short of wishing his wife dead on several occasions and then had the nerve to wonder if she is a bad person.