Name: Zombie Queen of Newbury High
ISBN: 9780142412565

Amanda Ashby

While trying to cast a love spell on her date on the eve of the senior prom, Mia inadvertently infects her entire high school class with a virus that will turn them all into zombies.

Zombie Queen of Newbury High

Sarah Sammis

I pre-ordered Zombie Queen of Newbury High in the fall of 2008 at the same time I ordered You Had Me at Halo. I was (and still am) a subscriber to Amanda Ashby's blog and bought both books together on the basis of her posts. Although I read You Had Me at Halo in the summer it took me until December to review it. Likewise I didn't actually read Zombie Queen of Newbury High until my New Year's holiday.

Mia's blissfully happy. She's dating her own special love god, Rob the high school football quarterback. She envisions the perfect prom where Rob takes her and she has the perfect dress. All that comes crashing down when Samantha, aka miss popularity, begins to make a move on the love god.

Love God isn't Mia's term for Rob, I'm borrowing it from the Georgia Nicholson series because the set up is the same until Mia learns that magic is real and the wrong magic can turn people into zombies. Worse yet, she's been tricked into to performing just such a spell and if she can't reverse it, her classmates will all become zombies through a four step transformative process.

So often the zombie stories focus so much on the upcoming total annihilation of humanity as the undead feast on brains and turn their victims that the reason behind the zombie outbreak is never explained nor is any thought on the mechanism for spreading the infestation beyond the ensemble cast given. It's just taken as fact that all the world will become zombied if the heroes can't stop them. Shaun of the Dead thinks through containment and now Zombie Queen of Newberry High answers how zombies are created and gives some thought to why the world hasn't fallen prey to hordes of zombies yet.

All of this happens in the setting of a typical American high school with the prototypical characters played up for laughs. The dialogue and descriptions aren't as over the top as in Louise Rennison's Georgia Nicholson series but it's still goofy, lighthearted and fun with enough underlying pathos of a Mia knowing that if she doesn't succeed in undoing the spell the authorities will have to kill all her friends before they can spread the disease beyond the high school.

Next year her third book is coming out, Fairy Bad Day. I'm looking forward to it.

Quiet, unpopular, non-cheerleading Mia is blissfully happy. She is dating super hot football god Rob, and he actually likes her and asked her to prom! Enter Samantha?cheerleading goddess and miss popularity? who starts making a move for Rob. With prom in a few days, Mia needs to act fast. So she turns to her best friend, Candice, and decides to do a love spell on Rob. Unfortunately, she ends up inflicting a zombie virus onto her whole class, making herself their leader! At first she is flattered that everyone is treating her like a queen. But then zombie hunter hottie Chase explains they are actually fattening her up, because in a few days, Mia will be the first course in their new diet. She?s sure she and Chase can figure something out, but she suggests that no one wear white to prom, because things could get very messy.

Zombie Queen of Newbury High

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