Description
Finalist for Foreword Reviews' IndieFab Novel of the Year for Multicultural fiction and Horror. Even before the apocalypse, nine-year-old Letitia Johnson's life had never been simple. Shuttled from foster home to foster home in the impoverished neighborhood of Mott Haven, it was all she could do to keep track of her little sister. When the apocalypse came, she tried to keep her sister's kindergarten safe by locking them all in a tiny school bathroom, hiding while they waited for a rescue that never came. For five days, they hid. They hid while their teachers were being eaten, while their classmates were being killed. They hid while the Bronx was being evacuated. Now, there's no one left to help them. There's no place left to hide. It's just her, one ax, twelve kindergarteners, twelve garden stakes, and a will to live.
While the cast of this novel is primarily children, the book is intended for adults and contains material unsuitable for younger readers.
Reviews
2014 IndieFab Award Winner in Multicultural Adult Fiction Everything I Know About Zombies is that highly agreeable thing: a book for adults (please don't give it to your nine-year-old) about children, written largely from a child's viewpoint, that is not at all childish. That's quite a clever balancing act to perform, and one at which far more experienced authors have failed. I loved, too, the extremely deft narrative voice, its shifts in dialect with point of view, its wry, sometimes ironic, tone. Moreover, the book gives itself the space to use its characters to explore ideas, important ideas about race, and society, and parenting, about self-sufficiency and inter-dependence and violence. And that's where the fiction starts holding up a mirror to reality, and why - over and above the wonderful Letitia - I think this is a book (and a genre) worth reading. --Harriet Goodchild, Heroines of Fantasy (unstarred) For adults, and perhaps young adult readers, it is a stellar addition to the zombie genre, at once page-turning and lyrical. Without scaring off genre readers, Everything I Know could be classified as a literary novel. Williams is an expert with dialect and the inner city setting. Letitia is a fully-realized protagonist, both mature and vulnerable. Yet, she's not impossibly mature. She really does seem like a nine-year-old, albeit a more street smart nine-year-old who's already had children in her care ... the portrayal of kids in this situation could have veered towards sentimentality, but it doesn't, because their reactions seem entirely realistic. So Williams' apocalypse is both more harrowing, and more human ... there is plenty here to satisfy genre lovers, which is a testament to how well it straddles the line between gory genre and literature. --Henry Baum, Self-Publishing Reviews (5 stars)
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