Taste the Books: Review Morsels #56 Mira Grant: "Newsflesh" Series (Part 2)

Intro

Hello beauties!

Welcome again to my own brand of mini reviews! I never thought I'd do minis, until I recapped a few of my long reviews in some digest post in 2014, and then guest-posted some shorties for a blogging event in 2015. And Karen from For What It's Worth started praising my short recs/recaps 😊. Just to be clear,  I'm NOT taking a break from writing long reviews - no such luck LOL (though for anthologies, shorter books or books that I didn't enjoy/I don't have enough to say about, I decided to stick to minis). But while I'm making up my mind about a new book I've read, I might as well give you the short version 😉. Just be warned - this feature will be VERY random!

Note: all the mini blurbs (in italics) are of my own creation.

Blackout by Mira Grant

(Newsflesh #3)

★★★

What started as your average political conspiracy (only, in a world where a zombie-making virus run/runs rampant) turned out to be deadlier and more outrageous than anyone could imagine, and now the bloggers at After the End Times are knee-deep in it and fighting tooth and claw for their lives and the truth - with the added complication that it's insanely hard to tell your friends from your foes, and the added thrill of cloning technology...

***

First thing first: I'm going out of my way to make this review spoiler-free (as I did with the blurb), but just by mentioning certain elements of the plot and the writing, I'll probably manage to give you ideas about what happened before and what happens in this particular book. Sorry about that. Also, my thoughts about this installment are coloured by the same bias that informed my review for the previous one...anything that resembles incest is a definite NO for me, and last time I checked, even if they were born from different sets of parents, Georgia and Shaun Mason grew up together as siblings. End of rant.
I have to admit that Blackout benefits from the double POV (I'm not going to tell you who the second narrator is, though I'm sure it's not hard to fathom): not being in Shaun's messed-up head half the time feels like taking an every-other-day vacation during a particular stressful week at work. Then again, he's taken to showing enough restraint to avoid punching his staff in the face when they, God forbid, touch his one giant sensitive spot. Alas, he's NOT taken to cutting the talking-with-the-dead crap...he doesn't even stop when something happens that should relieve him from that particular need (on the contrary, his psychosis takes a more sinister turn, and I wonder how - and if - he will ever get over it, because the book doesn't say)*. Another problem I have with this installment is that everything's super-implausible and super-over-the-top, from the conspiracy itself to the cloning subplot (so to speak)...clones, clones everywhere, and especially considering that the story is set a little more than 15 years from now, I wonder how the author, 12 years ago, could imagine a near future with such level of cloning accuracy and not have a clue about AI running/ruining our lives instead. Last but not least, for a zombie series, the zombie stay pretty much on the background most of the time (again). I did have fun with this installment and the series as a whole (though I can't condone the virtual-incest thing), and they contain some neat ideas, but this ain't fantasy, and I tend to want a bit more plausibility in my sci-fi/thriller novels...(...including the fact that a blogger not affiliated with any political party could never be appointed as Vice-President of the U.S.A. on a whim).

*Later edit: having read the companion collection Rise, I got an answer about that at least...

Content note: the "Queer" label is only due to the fact that one of the female characters hints at liking girls (as well as boys) once.

Note: this is a finished series that has been around for years now, so I decided to only write mini - or, well, midi 😅 - reviews for its installments, to ease my review burden...

Feedback by Mira Grant

(Newsflesh #4)

★★★★

While the Mason siblings and their friend Buffy are following a Republican senator's presidential campaign and unveiling a deadly conspiracy in the process, a diverse team of bloggers (and found family) covering the Democrat side of the race is doing the same...until they're forced to run for their lives, and even that may not be enough.

***

Feedback is, for all purposes, a companion novel that covers the same timespan as Feed, following a different team of reporters involved with the Democrat side of the presidential race. This means that the Masons are only referenced to from time to time, but on the other hand, some of the characters that were only a blip on the radar in Feed get lot of exposure (and justice) here, or at least make an apparition. It took me a bit more to warm up to the new team - they don't exactly steal the scene like Georgia did in the original run - but at least none of them are sleeping with their adoptive siblings, so there's that 😅. The new characters are diverse in every possible way, which makes sense for a group who's following the Democrat campaign - Black, Asian, Irish, lesbian, bisexual, non-binary. Also, there are A LOT more zombies who actually do (or are manipulated to do) stuff...scary stuff, creative stuff. Lastly, as usual, Grant/McGuire doesn't shy from punching us in the guts, which is one of the things she does best (honestly, we love her for that more than we hate her for the characters' - and our - heartbreak 😉).
So...my problems? First, if the incidents involving the zombies are supposed to have happened while the Georgia and Shaun were doing their thing in Book 1, there's NO WAY they couldn't have known about those and put two and two together (I guess the author didn't have a clue she would end up writing this book back then). Second, the trials that our new team endures bear an astonishing resemblance to those the Masons went through in the original trilogy (minus the cloning part). Third, the reporters here don't seem to do a great deal of, you know, reporting, compared with Georgia and Shaun - and yet they end up uncovering the big conspiracy BEFORE the siblings do (though part of it falls into their laps), only to be offered the chance to step away because the stuff is too dangerous. Which, I realise, makes sense, since the Mason's team is the one who'll get into the fight...not to mention, not everyone wants to be a hero...but it's counterintuitive and a bit underwhelming. That said, the story is good and moves at a tight pace, the characters are solid, and we get some of the answers we didn't in the rest of the series, so all is well...

Note: this is a finished series that has been around for years now, so I decided to only write mini - or, well, midi 😅 - reviews for its installments, to ease my review burden...

 Rise by Mira Grant

(A Newsflesh Collection)

★★★

Tales from the Newsflesh zombie plague and beyond: from its makers to some of its casualties, from the early days to the aftermath, from US to AUS, from side characters' origin stories to protagonists' curtain calls.

***

Rated 3.5 really.

First thing first...I'm still salty about Georgia and Shaun being adopted sibling AND lovers, so I'm taking it out on the rating. Secondly, I could have lived without three of these stories - not that they were bad, but they didn't do anything for me, or I didn't care for the characters.
Here's the breakdown:
Countdown -> How the zombie plague came to be. Already covered in the main series, and the details didn't add much to it.
Everglades -> Too short for us to care for the protagonist, and too underdeveloped as a whole, though the premise could have been interesting.
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats -> Some of the first heroes of the Rising fight for their lives (or the lives of others) at Comic Con. Leave it to Grant/McGuire to make you root for the doomed. Cool setting, and the story makes for great commentary about the human tendency to underplay fatal risks.
(Note: in the introduction to this one, Grant uses "effected" instead of "affected", which is hilarious, since one of the characters in the story says she's prone to making the same mistake).
How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea -> Mahir goes to the antipodes to report on zombie kangaroos. OK, that's simplistic, but still. It turns out Australians have a different approach to the zombie plague, and try to be conservationists with their wildlife. Nice of them, but it makes for a scarcely exciting story.
The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell -> Foxy's origin story (I still think it's a far-fetched one, but oh well). Zombie plague meets primary schoolers with a side of social commentary. It's both thrilling and heartbreaking, and I liked it ("enjoyed" seems wrong in this case), but I have to wonder if it was a good idea to put a children carnage front and center.
Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus -> AKA please don't taunt Dr. Abbey 😂. The ending is a bit anticlimactic (or too simplistic/abrupt), but it's good to know damaged characters can hit it off and help each other...
All the Pretty Little Horses -> How the Masons decided to adopt. Another far-fetched origin story, at least when it comes to Stacy. It didn't make me more sympathetic to her or her husband...it probably had the opposite effect, if anything.
Coming to You Live -> A decent, ingenious and hopeful closure for the trilogy's main characters...but I still hold a grudge about the, you know, adopted-siblings-with-benefits thing.

Note: this is a finished series that has been around for years now, so I decided to only write mini - or, well, midi 😅 - reviews for its installments, to ease my review burden...

So, have you read/are you planning to read any of the above? And if you have, what do you think of them? Do you post mini reviews? Do you like to read them?