Tomorrow Land by Mari Mancusi

Title: Tomorrow Land
Author: Mari Mancusi
Pages: 281
Publisher: NLA Digital
My rating: 3.2 stars
Goodreads rating: 3.69 stars
Published: March 8, 2012

I requested this title on NetGalley and was approved.  The author and publisher are not getting any favoritism from giving me the eBook to read.  My review is honest.

Description:

Imagine finding your first love, only to be ripped apart by the apocalypse. Peyton Anderson will never forget the day she was forced to make a choice--between her family--and Chris Parker, the boy she'd given her heart. Now, four years later, as she steps from the fallout shelter and into a dead and broken world, he's the only thing on her mind.

All Chris "Chase" Parker wanted was to take Peyton away and keep her safe from harm. But he waited for hours in the rain on judgment day and she never showed--breaking his heart without ever telling him why.

Now the two of them have been thrown together once again, reluctant chaperones to a group of orphan children in a post-apocalyptic world where the dead still walk...and feed. As they begin their pilgramage to the last human outpost on Earth, can they find a way to let go of old hurts and find the love they lost--all while attempting to save what's left of the human race?

I think I might have a love-hate relationship with this book. I picked it up almost as soon as I was done with Dearly, Departed, and it was so much different... 

Peyton is a kick-butt part cyborg 19-year-old girl after her four years in the fallout shelter/time capsule her father put her in when the apocalypse came.  It wasn't too sudden - there were signs all around them, and it had basically already come in the form of "zombies" somewhere around a few weeks.  {Disclosure - the reason why I use the quotation marks with the word zombies is, well... read it and you'll find out.}  Peyton is a bit of a wallflower, only rising in popularity at school because she's dating one of the jocks.  With each chapter going back and forth between the years 2030 and 2034, you get to see more of what she's really like in the future chapters, and what she would like to be in the past chapters.  Plus, its nice to see how the person she was shapes the person she is.  You find out what happens in the past to make her part cyborg, which is kind of cool. 

Chris is a typical nerd.  Chase seems to be a typical "non-leader leader" in the apocalypse.  Yes, they are the same person.  But they seem SO different in the past chapters v. the future chapters.  Chris is just this sweet little stalker boy with a major crush on Peyton, who really doesn't like him.  At all.  Chase is the second-in-command of the rag-tag group of survivors, and apparently gets gorgeous.  An apocalypse can do that to a guy *winks*. 

The book was pretty entertaining, but there were a few things that kind of drove me nuts.  I don't want to give anything away, so I'm not going to say what it was.  But lets just say I don't think something like that would cause someone to almost bleed to death.  I honestly think that one incident's impossibility factor was one thing that made me rate it lower.  That, and I feel like I needed to read Neuromancer by William Gibson.  But the twists and turns the author puts out there are pretty good, and, for the most part, realistic.  It was worth the time reading it.