I Love Him to Pieces

Gr 7 Up—This first book in a series of horror romances is a stellar stand-alone thriller. Florida teens Jack Chen and Dicey Bell are from different worlds: he is a super-geek who plays RPGs and reads research projects for fun while she is a star baseball player, the only girl on the team. When they're paired together for the raise-an-egg project, neither of them expects to get romantically involved-or to end up sticking together to hold off a zombie plague. When Jack gets bitten, only an experimental drug developed by his scientist parents can keep him from turning—and he'll only survive with Dicey's help. More romance than horror, the story has delightful dialogue, engaging characters, and pitch-perfect flirting. Görrissen captures the personalities of the characters in body language and facial expressions, revealing far more about what they're thinking and feeling than is provided in the dialogue alone. This is a strong beginning to a series of short teen romances that will later feature a vampire, faerie, and "monster" boyfriend. Readers of R. L. Stine's "Goosebumps" graphic-novel series (Scholastic) will enjoy this more mature, character-driven horror story.—Alana Joli Abbott, formerly at James Blackstone Memorial Library, Branford, CT