Zombie Baseball Beatdown

Bacigalupi, Paolo. Zombie Baseball Beatdown. Little, Brown BFYR, 2013.

Rabi and his friends love baseball. Their parents work at a meat processing plant. The plant uses weird chemicals in their cows, which then causes people to become zombies, and also the cows become zombies. The boys then use their baseball skills to save the day.

This particular book took a while to get interesting. With a fairly simple plot, the story itself is probably only enjoyable as an audiobook, when the listener gets to hear zombie cows mooing. One of the boys attaches a still-"living" zombie cow head to a car as some sort of odd, mooing hood ornament. I have some students who would enjoy this book, but it takes so long to get weirdly interesting that many of them would abandon the book before it had a chance to hook them.

Recommended for: young adults, tweens
Red Flags: zombie violence
Overall Rating: 3/5 stars