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Twice Shy
     

Twice Shy

4.8 7
by Patrick Freivald
 

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High School Sucks. It's worse when you're dead.

Ohneka Falls is a small, Western New York town where everyone knows everyone and nothing of note happens. Ani Romero is a sixteen-year-old girl who wants to play sports, hang out, and kiss Mike, her middle-school crush. A childhood carrier of the zombie virus, she died at fourteen but didn't become a mindless,

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Overview

High School Sucks. It's worse when you're dead.

Ohneka Falls is a small, Western New York town where everyone knows everyone and nothing of note happens. Ani Romero is a sixteen-year-old girl who wants to play sports, hang out, and kiss Mike, her middle-school crush. A childhood carrier of the zombie virus, she died at fourteen but didn't become a mindless, brain-eating monster. Her controlling mother forces her to join the emo crowd to hide her condition behind a wall of black clothes and makeup, and her friends abandon her.

When creeper Dylan learns her secret, he falls into obsession,
with Ani and with death. She bites him in self-defense. Persecuted by the jocks and ignored by Mike, Ani struggles through the motions of life hoping her other's research unveils a cure, or Dylan dooms them all to a hungry, walking death.

As her emo facade crumbles in the face of jealousy and obsession,
Ani knows that the worst thing she can do is be true to herself.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
And you think your mom is weird. A carrier of Zombie Virus since birth, Ani died two years ago. Since then, her mom--formerly a top ZV researcher, now Ani's high school nurse--has kept her daughter's body more or less intact and her brain-eating impulse largely in check, all the while feverishly working on a cure. With her mom's encouragement but against her natural inclinations, Ani joins the emo crowd at school to justify her pale skin, decaying-body-concealing clothing and job at the gaming shop, whose incense helps to mask the ever-present scent of formaldehyde. Less an action-adventure than a study of this peculiar mother-daughter relationship, Freivald's debut milks all humor inherent in the situation while avoiding none of the darkness. The juxtaposition of the aggressively normal against the completely bizarre--Ani and "Dr. Frankenmom" unpack the bananas before heading downstairs into the state-of-the-art lab for more serum testing--is just right. As junior year lurches along (just like Ani on her perpetually broken hip), Ani finds herself chafing against her mother's restrictions and caught between two boys: the seriously unhinged emo Dylan, who is obsessed with death, and the utterly adorable jock Mike, a childhood friend whose psycho girlfriend targets Ani for bullying. If some plot twists and secondary characterization falter, Ani's intelligent, ZV-enhanced snark never does. A compulsively readable and pleasantly different zombie tale, all the way to its pull-no-punches end. (Horror. 14 & up)

Product Details

ISBN-13:
9781936564507
Publisher:
JournalStone
Publication date:
10/28/2012
Pages:
240
Product dimensions:
6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:
13 - 17 Years

Meet the Author

Patrick Freivald is an author, teacher (physics, robotics, and American Sign Language), and beekeeper. He lives in Upstate New York with his beautiful wife, two birds, two dogs, too many cats, and several million stinging insects.

Patrick has written short fiction for Flash Fiction Online, and for The Uninvited Magazine. He is the author of Love Bites, a novella published by Pterotype Digital, and Recovery, a crime thriller written with his twin brother Phil, due out in 2012 from Cogito Medias.

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