K. A. Schloegel

Don't get yourself fooled by a really bad cover, folks, this book is a little gem!

An absolute delight, cheeky and bittersweet, ironic and smart, PSEA is a story within story.

Eleanor is a normal girl who quietly stumbles through her high school highs and lows. She is one of the invisible ones, whose name hardly anyone remembers and who has a secret crash on a popular jock.

Everything changes when she decides to write a high-school romance as her English literature project.

Between hilarious zombie invasion caused by a supervillain, where her main characters - Sarah, Marky and Brandon struggle to survive and save their town, and Eleanor's blog entries about her real problems encompassing bullying at school, family and bitching about the unfairness of life in general...

...this book is ingenious and unexpectedly deep.

Eleanor's online conversations with her best friend Marky and her attempts at writing, slowly make a change within her, and by the end of the book she takes control of her life and her surroundings, just as clever Marky realises how to best his bullies.

The dialogues in this book are to die for, hilarious in a very nerdy way...

(blog entry about Eleanor's dad who is an FBI agent)

Special Agent Jack Armstrong Fun Fact
Dad’s car has a vanity license plate. Yes, the Cheapest
Man in America put out his hard-earned money for a special
plate. But you’d never know by looking at it. It took him
three weeks of research to find the most inconspicuous three letter and three-number combination possible. Then he ordered that one. The man bought a vanity plate with the sole purpose of NOT drawing attention to himself. I guess he was afraid that if left to chance, he might end up with AGT 007 or DVL 666 or something.
As if people haven’t already snatched those up.
4 COMMENTS
Marky said: What about JLO 247?
Elmer said: Jello 24-7?
Marky said: Damn right it is.
Elmer said: Huh?

Please, give this book a go. It might surprise you.… (lisätietoja)

I got this book directly from the author. I am a bit leery about getting books that way because I have gotten some pretty bad ones, so I was ecstatic to discover that this was a really neat book. It was creative and very engaging!

Eleanor is a high school girl, dealing with feeling in visible to her classmates. She does have one superpower though and that is the power to write. She takes an independent study class and starts writing a story about a pop girl with brains; it's supposed to be your typical high school romance, that is until somehow zombies work their way into the story. Then suddenly the story turns into a non-stop fight for all of the humanity in Minneapolis.

I really enjoyed this book. It switches between the zombie story that Eleanor is writing and blog posts done by her about her life in school. Schloegel does a pretty good job of keeping the two stories separate and the stories are both very engaging separately and together. I liked that Schloegel uses one distinct writing style for the story Eleanor is writing and a different one for the blog posts she writes. This way of telling the story was very creative and it was interesting to see how Eleanor's book was influenced by the actions happening to her in high school.

Schloegel's writing style is sharp, energetic, and enjoyable. He uses a lot of short sentences, but rather than be annoying this helps the scenes seem sharper and the action seem more immediate. The action scenes are down really, really well. I loved the snarky attitude of some of the characters. The wit brought into the story kept it from getting too serious and was really amusing.

Anyone who has read previous reviews knows that I really love a good zombie story, and this one was actually one of the more fun and better ones I have read. Even with all the hilarious zombie mayhem, Schloegel manages to touch on some serious issues around kids learning to be themselves and finding their niche in both life and school. It was nice to have to story carry some weighty topics as well as be lots of fun.

I had a couple minor quibbles. Eleanor bases some of the characters in her book on real-life characters; in Mikey's case she doesn't change the name. This got a little bit confusing because I couldn't remember what the Mikey in the story did vs. the Mikey in the blog post. This may have been intentional and it wasn't horribly confusing, but every once in a while I had to check back to see what I had already read about Mikey. I also found a couple minor typos in the book, nothing huge.

I seriously enjoyed this book and hope to read more books from Schloegel in the future. I hope this book starts getting some more attention because it really is a great book, in fact it is one of the better zombie books I have read.… (lisätietoja)