Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell

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Mira Grant: Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (2014, Little, Brown Book Group Limited)

96 pages

English language

Published May 12, 2014 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

ISBN:
978-0-356-50510-7
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5 stars (6 reviews)

2 editions

Seared into my memory

5 stars

I read this when it was new, and I had a child in preschool. It was very good. And I never, ever want to read it again.

There's a zombie outbreak in an elementary school, a cascading failure of one preventative measure after another, and it follows how one teacher manages to get some of her students out alive. At a terrible cost.

It's an extended metaphor for school shootings, but years later, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools reopened with children entering the campus one at a time after a health screening (temperature checks, not blood tests), sanitizing everything...and then I saw a picture of a classroom with individual transparent barriers around each desk.

At least Covid doesn't turn its victims into mindless killing machines.

Cross-posted on my website

Review of 'Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Grabs you by the throat and won't let go.

Elaine – Miss Oldenburg to her 6yo students – takes her job seriously. Very seriously. As a grade one teacher in the post-pandemic Newsflesh world, that job is quite different to what readers of our world would expect. And it's probably even further removed from what readers in 2014 would have recognised. Elaine is exceptionally good at her job. So when it all goes horribly wrong, no one could possibly blame her … could they?

Unfortunately, for me, there was frustrating technical issues with this one. For one thing, the leading was so tight that I had trouble (physically, I mean) keeping my eyes on the correct line. That slowed my reading down significantly. Secondly, although the text is clearly delineated into chapters, the ebook consists of one giant chapter from start to finish.

I don't blame the author for these …

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Subjects

  • Fiction, horror