Friday 27 January 2017

Since The Sirens by E E Isherwood + #FreeBook


Since The Sirens by E E Isherwood
Self published in December 2015.

How I got this book:
Downloaded the ebook from Amazon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Banished by bad decisions to spend the summer with his great-grandmother, Liam Peters thinks his life is over. After all, Marty Peters is a tough woman to be around. Maybe she wouldn’t be so bad if she'd just take an interest in the modern technology he loves. Sure, she has some insight to her … but the woman is practically “pushing daisies.” Not surprisingly, as tornado sirens announce a city-wide emergency, Liam discovers why that term should be avoided … well … like the plague.
When Grandma Marty tries to send him on his way, refusing to abandon her home, Liam sees his situation in a new light. Something deep inside awakens—and he chafes at the thought of leaving his 104-year-old grandmother to die. Armed with two tiny pistols and an arsenal of knowledge from his overwhelming zombie book collection, Liam realizes he could be the hero and accomplish the impossible: rescue her.
With the interstate gridlocked, opportunist criminals looking to take what they can get, law enforcement desperate to keep the peace, and the military declaring St. Louis a war-zone, Liam and Marty find themselves wrapped up in a world of chaos and panic. But when the zombies begin to overshadow everything else, Liam comes to appreciate why there are no atheists in foxholes.


YA horror fiction isn't a genre I usually choose to read, but Since The Sirens caught my attention with its 104 year old great-grandmother, Marty, as one of the lead characters. Together with her 15 year old great-grandson, Liam, she must try to escape zombie apocalypsed St Louis city. Isherwood does a good job of presenting the realities of such an ordeal and I would have liked more scenes of the reality from Marty's unique point of view as we get at the beginning of the book. Unfortunately she is then mostly relegated to hallucinating about a weirdly-spoken angel while attention focuses on the agonies of indecision and self-doubt experienced by Liam.

Since The Sirens isn't a particularly long book, but is slowly paced without much in the way of variation in speed. I often found myself willing Liam especially to just Get On With It! Isherwood has obviously spent time researching his St Louis settings, but I thought too much of this information was divulged in scenes that should have been snappier to maintain my excitement. Otherwise Since The Sirens has a good story arc and, despite being the first of a series, I was delighted to encounter A Proper Ending! There is plenty of scope for the further novels - five at the time of writing - but, as a reader, I appreciated not being abandoned mid cliffhanger.

Etsy Find!
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Search Literary Flits for more:
Books by E E Isherwood / Horror fiction / Books from America

2 comments:

  1. To be fair, I don't really read or watch horror at all either. It's not my genre. But it is interesting to have a grandmother as one of the main characters - that doesn't happen too often. Especially in YA.

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    1. That's what Ithought. Maybe elderly characters should count towards diversity!

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