5 Smooches!
Synopsis
Leisel and Evelyn lost everything. Husbands. Families. Friends. Lives that made sense. All they had left was each other, and a friendship that could withstand anything…
Even an apocalypse.
Until one fateful night, the marginal safety they’d come to rely on comes to a vicious and brutal end. With the help of Alex & Jami, both unlikely allies, Leisel and Evelyn are able to escape their shattered sanctuary only to find themselves face-to-face with a much altered, much crueler life where they have to find the way—and the will—to stay alive in a world they no longer recognize.
Traveling across a broken and infection-ridden country; the road-weary group are pitted against endless violence, improbable circumstances, and the ultimate loss.
Everything comes at a price—especially safety, the cost of which could very well strip them of the one thing they’ve tried so hard to cling to: their humanity.
Yet along with all the trials they’re forced to endure, there’s also hope in the form of love. Having loved Leisel from afar, Alex attempts to put the pieces of her fractured heart back together.
But in such a savage world, is there room for love?
In a place of nightmares-made-reality, where the living should be feared far more than the dead, an unbreakable friendship and a love amongst all odds can mean the difference between life and death.
There are friends…
And then there are Leisel and Evelyn.
Review
This is a really hard review for me to write. I have been thinking and thinking about what I want to say and how I want to say it. It is easy to say that I loved it and it was amazing and I for damn sure couldn’t put it down and how I read it all in one sitting. That is the easy part because this book is not my usual read. I like love stories. All of them. But this isn’t a love story in the traditional sense but it TOTALLY was a love story. The love story just happened to be between to best friends. Two women that loved each other long before the apocalypse.
“You made me so happy that day, Eve, and every day since. I love you, and I am grateful every single day that you married my husband’s best friend, that you became my best friend. You make the days worthwhile. You make everything worthwhile.”
Thicker Than Blood is Leisel and Evelyn’s story of loving and helping one another survive during a zombie apocalypse. That is right folks, I read a freakin zombie book and I loved every stinking minute of it. But, hey, I don’t know if you can REALLY call it a zombie book because it wasn’t really about the zombies. It was about these two women trying to make it in a world where most people have lost their humanity, where you fear another human more than you fear living in the wild with the zombies. That was the most interesting part of this book, the people they met and how it affected their lives and friendship directly. And boy what an incredibly crazy ride it was. Crazy religious folks, prostitutes with no legs, fights to the death. See, the interesting part of this book wasn’t the zombies, it was EVERYTHING else. Just don’t go into this book with any preconceived notions because your probably wrong. REALLY REALLY wrong. For those wondering if their is an actual romantic element to this book, there definitely is and it was definitely sexy and beautiful and heartbreaking.
“I wanted this comfort and warmth, this intimacy. I wanted something to relieve the fear, the cold, the crippling guilt and regret. Just a for moment, for a single moment, I wanted to remember what it felt like to be alive. “
Ok, enough about the story. I really want to talk about the writing. This book has two POV’s; Liesel’s and Evelyn’s. It reads like each author picked a character and wrote for that one character the entire book and I really loved that. It made them believable and real. Liesel and Evelyn are so very different so I grew to expect a certain style of writing and feeling from each character as they switch POV’s. The book was written beautifully. I certainly expect that of Madeline but this is the very first book I have read by Claire C. Riley and I am happy to report that she did not disappoint. All of the writing was so crazy descriptive. I felt like I was there. Like I could smell the sweat and blood. Like I could hear the squish and pops. It was almost too much for me sometimes. LOL! I felt like I could see all of the different kinds of people they met in their journeys. I cannot fully explain how immersed I was in this novel, just know that it was amazing.
I won’t tell wether this book has an HEA or not because my idea of an HEA isn’t always the idea of what others may consider an HEA. Maybe I am a bit morbid? It ended how I would expect it to given the circumstances.
“We should have learned by now that nothing was ever easy in this world. Yet, like children, we remained forever hopeful, optimistic that just once something would go right for us.
You meet so many coloful characters in this book and I am so excited to tell you that there will be a second book in this series and that I CANNOT WAIT! MORE E, PLEASE. NOW!
~Amie
