Deadline (Newsflesh, #2)

by Mira Grant

Review originally posted at Simply Adrift.

Deadline as a sequel does not disappoint! When I picked up the first book Feed the other year, I was in a zombie reading phase. I was looking for any zombie, post-apocalyptic book I could find. Feed however was not that sort of zombie book. Feed was way more political however there was enough zombie action to make it still feel like a zombie book.

The Newsflesh series is set years in the future after zombies have become apart of everyday life. The world has adapted to zombies and come up with precautions to protect the rest of the living world. This series is just so damn compelling! I couldn't put it down, but in saying that this book is pretty big, it took me nearly two weeks to read. But every single page is so, so, so good. It doesn't feel too long at all.

I feel like I can't review this book properly without revealing the ending of Feed. So if you haven't read the first book in this series do not read the below in the spoiler brackets. Also, before I start, if you haven't read Feed then you NEED to! So pick it up now!

Deadline picked up a year after the end of Feed, after Georgia Mason was killed to stop from becoming a zombie. To be honest this was not immediately clear to me and I thought it picked up something like eight years after the end of Feed. This is because the book confirms that George (Georgia's nickname) died in the year 2032 however all of the blog posts being posted at the end of the chapters have the date 2041. But then later in the book it's confirmed that George was killed only a year prior to the events that we were reading. I WAS SO CONFUSED. Maybe it was a typo? I couldn't wrap my head around it so I just went with the fact that it was either a typo or the blog posts were not published until eight years after the events of the book.

Anyway, Deadline starts off a year after the ending of Feed. The main POV of this book is now Shaun, George's brother. And we immediately see that Shaun is not coping with George's death very well at all. He's become mentally ill and hears Georgia talking to him all the time. He talks back to her and she answers. Throughout most of his chapters he refers to himself as crazy and that he has anger issues.

This was an interesting way to keep George in the story still. She's dead yet she still lives on in Shaun's head. This also made me really sad to see that Shaun could not cope without George at all. Their relationship was this weird incestral type of love, but at the same time they aren't actually related by blood so it isn't incestral at all. And they also never crossed the physical line of love either.

Deadline starts off with Shaun finding out that the CDC really isn't doing the things the world thinks it's doing. A runaway doctor goes to Shaun and After the Times news website to get help. Shaun finds out the conspiracy theory that he and George were chasing is only the beginning and the people that killed George aren't who he originally thought they were. I loved this. I loved getting to see that the original story is so much more than you realise from the first book.

The ending of this book? Wow. I called the reveal about 20% of the way through but I am SO GLAD it ended that way! Even though I wasn't shocked at the reveal I was still excited. So, so good.

Overall, Deadline had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. It was compelling and so much fun to read. The conspiracy theories were crazy! And to be honest I didn't understand it sometimes because it was so factual with numbers, but also because the book would leave you to come to your own conclusion and wouldn't outright say what those facts meant.

I picked up the third book Blackout straight away because I really wanted to see where this story was going to be taken. I also wanted to see what conspiracy theory was correct.

I definitely think you should start this series if you haven't already!

Have you read Deadline? Did you like it? Did you not like it? Could you wrap your head around the conspiracy theories?

Always,
Jordon

This review was originally posted on Simply Adrift