Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Strictly speaking we're not supposed to post reviews until 30 days before publication, but since this book has well over a hundred reviews up on that execrable monopolizing review site-killing Amazon-owned Goodreads venue already, I don't see that my modest one is going to make any difference.
I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of zombie stories, particularly movies and TV shows, although the movie World War Z actually wasn't bad. That's about the only one I can say I liked though. Zombie stories make absolutely no sense, and even were I to give that a free pass (as I have been known to do with other genres from time to time), the ridiculous levels of violence inherent in these stories and the endless hordes of oncoming zombies are completely and utterly boring to me. There is no story there to be had. So why on Earth would I want to read a graphic novel about this very subject? Well I have a good answer to that: it wasn't about the zombies at all. I was willing to put up with the zombie story though, for the sake of enjoying a story about female friendship and bonding, and I was not at all disappointed.
The author is German (her last name is pronounced like vee-vague, with a very soft 'v', almost like an 'f') and she originally wrote this comic as part of her diploma at university (I want to go to a university where I can do a graphic novel and graduate! LOL!). Later it was expanded and changed a little bit and this is the English version. In it, Vivi is not your most capable survivor. She lives in one of the last two cities that have not been overrun. At one point early in the story, her incompetence causes her to run away and hide, and as it happens, she's hidden on the supply train, which she only fully realizes when it starts in motion, rolling along its tracks to the other city. There's no one onboard - so she believes, until she meets Eva - another stowaway.
The story really begins though when the train breaks down and their rescue team fails to materialize, throwing them upon their own skills, of which Vivi possesses few. Eva seems quite endowed with smarts and skills and the two, despite rough patches, start to bond and become loyal to one another over the course of the story. There was some zombie-killing action, of which I am not a fan at all, but it's par for the course, and in this book it's kept to a minimum, although it increases more as they journey.
In addition to the relationship between the two girls, I enjoyed the nuanced approach to zombie transformation, so even that wasn't as painful as it might have been. Overall, I really enjoyed the story. There's already a movie out about this and it's apparently being rendered into animated form (maybe?), and no doubt when Netflix gets their hands on it, I shall watch it. So why not see other zombie stories as bonding relationships? Well others that I've had any exposure to are almost unanimously ridiculous and pointless. The same story can typically be told without any zombies at all. In fact this one could have also, by having a plague (Coronavirus would be a starting point for example, but good luck getting Barnes and Noble to publish that one! LOL!), or some other apocalyptic catalyst. Zombies aren't required, but in this case they were tolerable. The real story though was Vivi and Eva and I commend this as a worthy read.
