Stained by Mike Mauthor book review

 Title: Stained

                                                   Author: Mike Mauthor

                                                   Pages: ebook

                                                   Series: Zombie I am

                                                   Genre: Post-apocalyptic world, zombies

                                                   Stars: 3/5

A swift outbreak changed Lin Matthew's world forever. 

A mysterious new student enrolled in Beaver High.

And a popular television show brought betrayal hence endangering Lin and his friends' life. 

Stained is a different take of a zombie tale like no other. 

I would like to firstly thank the author for providing me with a review copy and also for his patience, whilst I reviewed the book.

The story is set in the post apocalyptic world, where it revolves around Lin, who gets bitten by a zombie. After a year, he is back to normal....well not entirely normal as he is still carrying the virus and has to take medication as a result. But hey, the good news is that hasn’t become a flesh eating zombie right?! 

From here, we follow him through school, his friends and his love life.

One thing that I liked about this book is that the story focused on how society was coping with the virus outbreak. It didn’t sit around waiting for help, they actually had a solution and thought of ways to tolerate it. In addition, I also liked the fact that those infected with the virus wasn’t technically excluded from society. They weren’t isolated from everyone else, even if some were bullied from those that didn’t have the virus.

However, I really didn’t think this book was for me. I didn’t get a thorough understanding of the characters, especially Lin, who was the main protagonist. I didn’t feel anything for him, nor did I get to know more about him, just that he was madly in love with a girl called Alice (who I didn’t really find fascinating anyway). The only character that seemed to create some sort of mysterious element to the book was Daniel, but even then, the readers were kept shut out on anything about him and we only got to know his real story towards the end of the book. But that just felt like it was all very rushed and not elaborated enough.

I did like the overall concept of the plot and how society made the zombie-virus-outbreak into a game show. I thought that was a brilliant idea and indeed quite spooky. Nevertheless, the last couple of pages towards the end of the book fell really flat for me. I thought it was really unnecessary for Lin to get so angry and emotional that Daniel and Alice decided to go out. I understand that he would be angry with Daniel, but the mini outcry that exploded from him at that party was so out of character that it just wasn’t authentic enough. I also didn’t think his promise to declare war on Daniel really fit with the actual book. It’s just a girl for goodness sake and a girl that he hardly had to courage to talk to for more than 10 minutes! Again, the ending  seemed very rushed.

Finally, I didn’t like the style of writing. It was all very simple and quite repetitive.

Overall, although the general idea of the story is good, the way it was written and the characters that emerged made me give it a 3/5 stars. I think it could have been just a little bit more developed.