Back in 2012 I was completely amazed to fall madly in love with Warm Bodies, the novel by Isaac Marion that tells the story of a zombie named R who falls in love with a young woman named Julie. I didn’t think I was going to like “zombie romance,” but it drew me in. I liked the movie as well although I’m still upset that they whitewashed one of the characters. The book was marketed as a science fiction YA, but it worked just fine for me as a straightforward romance novel.

Finally we have a sequel, The Burning World. The Burning World deals with the aftermath of the events of Warm Bodies (in other words, SPOILERS AHEAD FOR WARM BODIES). A core group of survivors including the characters we met in Warm Bodies lies in a sports stadium and struggles to survive. Thanks to the events of the previous book, zombies are slowly starting to wake up, which creates many problems. For one thing, their wounds become fresh and life threatening, and Julie’s best friend Nora spends all her time trying to heal them. As R can attest, waking is a slow process, and R struggles with eye-hand coordination, breathing, eating food, and talking. He also struggles to repress memories of his past life, wishing to start completely over.

Challenges aside, things are coming along nicely when a rival group, Axiom, invades the Stadium in which most known survivors live. Suddenly Julie, Nora, and R are running for their lives, along with their reluctant ally Abram and his young daughter, Sprout. As they try to figure out whether to fight or keep running, and as their group gets bigger, R remembers more and more of his past life and his own role in bringing about the zombie plague.

This book is much more action and “fight the dystopia” oriented than romance oriented. Julie and R are a solid couple – indeed, one of the most satisfying elements of the book is seeing how solid they are. The conflicts are not romantic ones. Instead, the conflict involves surviving current dangers, overthrowing the status quo, and dealing with trauma and loss — something every major character in the book has to do in order to move forward.

The Burning World has plenty of touching moments, but it lacks the overall poignancy of Warm Bodies. On the other hand, it’s a satisfying dystopian novel. By introducing a state partway between zombie and living human, the entire zombie dynamic that readers are accustomed to is shaken up. When humans kill zombies, it feel less like the gratifying mayhem of The Walking Dead and more like a terrible, if sometimes necessary, tragedy. The action scenes are exciting and there’s a sense that even though bad people exist and do bad things, there are also good people everywhere. It’s a hopeful book despite many moments when all seems lost.

Like many YA dystopian books before it, The Burning World ends on a cliffhanger. The sequel, The Living, is supposed to be coming sometime this year (2017).

When I say that The Burning World is not a romance, that’s because there’s no major romantic arc; R and Julie start the book together, face trouble as a team, and end the book together. However, there is a wonderful aspect to their story. R and Julie fell in love with each other when they didn’t know much about each other. R couldn’t remember his pre-zombie life, so he was sort of a blank slate. He idolized Julie, which is especially obvious in the movie adaptation where her personality is “pretty” and she didn’t have to acknowledge any character flaws of his, because he had no past. His personality was based on loving her.

In this book, R and Julie grow together as more complicated people. This quote is from the very end of the book, so I’m marking it as a spoiler. It’s one of the grittiest and yet most romantic things I’ve ever read:

I love that quote because it’s about the real, mature, unconditional love that involves truly seeing another person and allowing love to help each person grow as an individual as well as a couple. It’s why I love this story, even though if you had told me prior to 2012 that I’d be so invested in zombie romance I would have scoffed. The romance between R and Julie, the friendships that they have with others, and the changes that those relationships cause keep this series heartwarming and fresh despite the fact that so many other zombie stories feel nihilistic and played out to me. It’s a sign that a genre can always surprise you and that love can be found in the strangest situations.