Title: World War Z
Author: Max Brooks
Narrators: Full cast (includes author and Nathan Fillion)
Rating (Story): ★★★☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★★
World War Z is the story of the zombie war, told in a series of interviews with the survivors. One of my favorite things about this book was that it starts with the first infections and covers all the details you might possibly want to know about how a zombie outbreak would go down. We start by learning about what the disease is like from a medical perspective. Then we see how different countries reacted politically and eventually militarily to the outbreak. And finally, we get little snippets of how individuals survived. I loved how realistic and believable all these details made the story. I also adored the full cast narration. It was just perfect for this book. The only downside for me was the narrative style and the length of the book. The interview style narrative seemed lazy to me, with the interview questions interrupting the flow of the story and serving as an artificial mechanism to transition between different topics. Due to this narrative style and the short length of the book, I never got particularly attached to any of the characters in the story and the whole thing lacked emotional impact.
I’ve heard great things about this audiobook because of all the star narrators so I was interested in checking it out. Even though I’m not much of a zombie fan. But it seems like an interesting way to tell the story – I hope to check it out!
The cast was good enough that I really would recommend that audiobook just for that! It was the only full cast recording I’ve listened too, but I’d love to find more.