Review: Graveminder, by Melissa Marr

Prior to writing Graveminder, Melissa Marr focused on YA romantic fantasy / sci fi writing; in this story, her first foray into adult fiction, Marr carries over those themes in a slightly darker vein. If you are familiar with this blog at all, you know that I'm all over the new higher-brow zombie-inclusion trend, and the insinuation on the book jacket that something would be crawling out of a grave was all the encouragement I needed to zap this title right into my Nook.


I wasn't sure what to expect, since while I like the zombie action, I'm not really a fan of romance, because too many writers take the easy road and make ultra-predictable novels based on sappy soft-core porn. Although Graveminder is billed as somewhat of a romance, I was pleasantly surprised, because the relationship between the novel's two main characters is really a back-burner issue, tangental to the main plot.

The novel opens with a strange interaction in a graveyard between an elderly woman and an oddly dirty, skinny girl that leaves the reader with a strong sense of Wrong; that feeling is substantiated a few pages later in a discovery that necessitates main character Rebekkah Barrow, a wanderer who has been resisting a strong urge to return to her hometown for many years, to attend to the final affairs of the woman who had become her adopted grandmother. Only a select few in the town are able to discuss events surrounding the dead woman, as well as other town eccentricities, without developing debilitating migraines. The juicy secret that binds the town is centuries old, and leads Rebekkah and her on-again, off-again childhood love literally to purgatory and back while a conspiracy involving the undead threatens to munch the brains of everyone in town.


Really, there is so much going on in this story that it's difficult to outline the plot without giving anything away. The chapters are told from a few different points of view, including some guest spots from zombie thoughts, so the reader has more pieces of the puzzle than the individual main characters do quite often, but these pieces don't fit together in any meaningful way until the main characters have caught up. There are times when Marr strays dangerously close to the hokey, during the periods when the characters transition between worlds, and these are the weakest parts of the novel, but overall she does an excellent job of allowing the characters, and readers, experience the events in an organic way; she never forces characters to do something ridiculous to belabor a point, and readers are trusted to keep up with the events and remember details on their own rather than having the literary neon signs that many authors provide throughout a plot. The character's relationships seem realistic, and the explanation given as to why there's not an uproar in the town over the events is simple and reasonable. Additionally, whether intended or not, there is some dark humor in the tale... or maybe I just find zombie attacks funny. Either way, I had a good time reading this story, and a hard time putting it down.

Rating: four and a half stars out of five. Entertaining, darkly funny, suspenseful tale of a town where Here and Now meets Hereafter.