Thanks Netgalley for the ARC.

This book was full of maaaaaaany tropes. At times I really enjoyed it because it felt satirical and satcastic. But most of the time it leans into cheesy territory.

The part where it's like: "we don't want to cause a.....frenzy" was laaaameo! Also, the book is very similar to True Blood (what little I remember anyways).

But then there were moments of brilliance:
"I remember once seeing a piece of art that said the people you love become ghosts inside you. What I realized now was that it was true of the people you killed, too." Page 64

All in all, this was a fun fast paced read!

I can't really give a fair review for I could just not get into this book. I tried several times reading it but It was moving to slow for me and would get confused on who was who with many characters.

I loved Kayla’s first book and queer YA horror will always pull me in. This has a little sci fi feeling to it mixed with horror vibes. A virus has made it so some humans need to eat human flesh to survive. Four friends go to a music festival (think Coachella) with a cooler full of synthetic flesh ready to celebrate. What could go wrong?

I thought this did a solid job of sucking me in. I was invested pretty quickly although I think this is a rare case when it could have been a bit longer. I would have liked more world building to flesh out the characters and what their lives were like since the virus took hold. We got some flash backs but I wanted more time with each female friend. This has the added bonus of a trans MC. I thought this was a fun horror romp that hit exactly what I wanted.

This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham was a wildly fun YA take on the zombie genre. A couple years before the start of the book, a small percentage of the worlds population went through a transformation, turning into Hollows and now require human flesh to survive. Fortunately, scientists created SynFlesh so those afflicted can live peacefully among civilization.
I really enjoyed This Delicious Death. It was a fast paced, quick read with likable characters and an engaging plot. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for granting me a copy of this book in return for my honest opinions.

Wow. What can I say. So not what I expected when I read the book involved a virus that turned people into flesh eating ghouls.

The book was very well done. Zoey and Celeste are so easy to love and their romance is beatifully done.

The book is excellent, exciting and not just for young adults. Loved it and I am 61 years young!

Recommend.

Zoey and her three besties head to a music festival, their first since a pandemic raged creating the Hollowing, a kind of zombie apocalypse. During the Hollowing, some people turned into ravenous cannibalistic creatures, called ghouls, and others their prey. The government developed synthetic meat that keeps the ghouls nourished and in control of their appetites—that is until someone at the festival finds a way to make the ghouls lose control over their craving for fresh 100% human food.

The story is primarily in Zoey’s perspective, but dips in on the other character’s points of view through flashbacks and epistolaries. The flashbacks nicely show how each of the girls dealt with their ghoulish transformations and showed how they became friends.

Zoey’s struggles involve her family’s fear of her ghoul status and her mad crush on Celeste. Meanwhile Valeria becomes enamored of the lead singer of one of the bands, and Jasmine simply tries to keep everyone safe.

I really liked how the author included diversity and LGBT characters including bisexual Zoey and trans Celeste. The way the foursome took care of each other, accepted each other for who they are, and provided support was truly heartwarming. Each of the friends was well developed and unique. While Jasmine was rarely in the spotlight, she stood out in my mind because of her flashback sequences.

All in all I found this book to be a fun read with great horror, thriller, and romance elements. Be sure to check out the adorable acknowledgment the author leaves for her cat, Squid in the back of the book.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thanks to Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, for providing an Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Selling Pitch:
Do you want a quirky girl YA that is annoyingly woke and full of virtue signaling? Somehow it’s also covid/apocalypse satire with gore and a mystery and very, very gay.

Pre-reading:
The cover is so fun. It makes me want to paint my nails yellow. Suddenly I’m seeing this book everywhere.

(I don’t know why I thought this was a serial killer book. It is not.)

Thick of it:
Oh, she’s got jokes. (This is the only joke I liked in this book.

Misspelled viscous lol

They’re not accosting you? They’re literally just talking to you. Like I know they’re being set up to be the villains, but all these boys did was come up to fellow hotel goers at a public pool.

Pete Davidson already has no sex appeal.

This is woke covid zombie satire?

It’s the boy-Cole because his bandmates don’t know he’s a ghoul. (If you can guess whodunnit immediately upon characters being introduced, there’s a problem.)

This book veers into toxic positivity territory. (Not veers, careens.)

Also, I don’t like how blasé this book and its characters are about killing people. The toxic oh they deserved to die like some kind of revenge thriller. Yuck.

Weird concept that your mother doesn’t want to die? I feel like this goes back to the if you’re pregnant and dying whose life do you save? Mom or baby? Also, her keeping a gun to disarm you, doesn’t necessarily mean she’s gonna kill you with that gun. But like what’s wrong with you? In what world do you want to put your mom at risk? How would you rather not be shot and killed rather than kill your own mother? This book has gone way too in on the idea that they didn’t choose to become ghouls, so any of their behavior is okay. It asks too much for suspension of disbelief. I just don’t believe the government would let people who were infected live as active murderers if there are people who aren’t infected that can still reproduce lol. Especially in other countries? Like this book has such huge world-building failures.

MGK is quaking. (OK, I lied. I liked that joke too.)

I thought they were an indie pop band, but maybe I missed something?

No one is writing female presenting in an incident report. This book gets tiring with the pc language.

But she said she’d never killed somebody before? That was killing somebody? So did she lie to her friends or? (Yet another dropped plot point.)

That’s a really bad comment to make. The period debate around trans people is so touchy. It’s almost like the author’s claiming periods are inherent to girlhood, but then people can pick and choose if they wanna experience it and still experience every part of girlhood. I don’t know. I’m hesitant to even comment on this. Trans women are women. Women have different definitions and experiences of womanhood. Live and let live.

How did her T-shirt survive a year? (Samantha, please stop trying to logic this book. Nothing makes sense.)

Anthropophagi were in that wacky Monstrumlogist series, weren’t they?

Not a cinnamon boy

And the most unsurprising plot twist

Okay Will Smith

Why would the government pay to refrigerate or power a building like this? A building they supposedly tried to burn down and cover-up.

And they’re just free to go after murdering people. OK cool.

Post-reading:
This is a goddamn mess of a book. Its world-building is a catastrophic error, but we’ll come back to that. It is your typical quirky, woke YA fare. Characters are only their tagged diversity labels, and then are so stereotyped it borders on offensive. It tries so hard to be current and funny. It’s not. It definitely has an element of toxic positivity to it.

And I just fundamentally can’t get over how bad the world-building is. It makes no sense, and it destroys the plot of this book. Somehow the reader is asked to suspend disbelief and believe that in the wake of an apocalypse that turns people into murderous ghouls (conveniently, we are never told what causes this beyond a virus awoken from permafrost, but we’re not told how it’s transmitted or how it works) the government allows them to live as long as they check in on a social media app. I- If you can read that and still be on board, I don’t know what to tell you. I just do not buy that they wouldn’t be rounded up and killed. It doesn’t make any sense that they’re allowing infected people to live their lives as normal because they essentially developed faux meat? This book is so chill with needless and senseless murder. It falls into that revenge thriller trap, where they’re like oh the villain deserved it so they can just die and we won’t ever have to feel bad for actively killing them. The more I think about this book and try to articulate how much is wrong with it, the angrier I get.

Let’s just talk about the plot of the novel. Somehow somebody’s dad was doing research to try and make diet pills for zombies. He’s done fucked up and made zombie extra hungry pills. Somehow this was done with mint. Somehow we’re not supposed to question this because we will not be getting an explanation. Somehow, this recipe? seeds? actively grown plants aren’t immediately destroyed? Somehow the building where they did this research survives the government trying to burn it down and cover it up. Somehow it has power and electricity for a refrigerator this whole time which conveniently has the antidote in it. Because somehow they just worked out an antidote and then it works perfectly and there are no side effects and then they didn’t use it on the people they had trapped in their lab. They just left them to rot
and didn’t kill them. Somehow they continue to survive for years in the exact same clothing they were first admitted in Somehow these literal children are trained in medical procedures and are able to use this abandoned antidote in the correct dosage and it’s not expired and we have no idea what it’s made out of and again somehow we’re not supposed to question this. I- This isn’t even all of it and I’m not really trying to be particularly humorous. When I say, this book is a goddamn mess.

Did I mention this happens at not Coachella?

If somehow you’re capable of putting all that aside, this book I guess has a queer friends-to-lovers romance in it?

Who should read this:
No, I’m not recommending this to anyone. Maybe if you like to hate-read YA books

Do I want to reread this:
No

Similar books:
* Retro by Sofia Lapuente and Jarrod Shusterman-cringe YA with a reality completion that abandons logic
* Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon-heavy on pop culture references, quirky, gay

This book was fantastic. It is the best book I have read in awhile. It is the summer after high school graduation and Zoey, Celeste, Valeria and Jasmine are headed to a music festival in the desert. They are all ghouls, people who have to eat human flesh to survive, or synflesh, a synthetic alternative. At the festival, something happens to Valeria, that causes her to turn feral and kill a person. The four girls band together to figure out what happened to her, and prevent it from happening to others.

I really liked the world building. I thought the ghouls were a great creation, and felt that the backstory made sense. The only thing that rang false to me was I don't think they would have been integrated into society as quickly as described in the book. The ending was pretty cool, complete with a secret laboratory. I liked all the main characters, it is a gift to have a group of friends like these four.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I'm a sucker for a good standalone book, particularly a good thriller/horror/mystery. This book was good. Predictable at times and keeps me on my toes in others. The characters were interesting and the queer representation was well done. Overall a great YA read that you can get through in a day.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This book left me slightly disappointed, although there were parts that I enjoyed. I found the characters to be very dynamic!

Thank you NetGalley, Sourcebooks Fire, and Kayla Cottingham for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

Admittedly when I requested this I didn’t think I was signing up for hulks crossed with werewolves, but I know this one ultimately isn’t going to be for me.

I know it’s a cliché but it’s definitely not the book it’s me! If that sounds like something you’d enjoy definitely give this one a shot!

Out of fairness I will not review this book on any retail sites as I did not finish it.

I received a free ebook ARC from Sourcebooks Fire via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Zoey and her friends are heading to a music festival, but they are not like the majority, they are Ghouls who eat synthetic flesh. They been living for 3 years following an event deemed The Hollowing. Once at the festival they are having a good time until one of their group becomes unexpectedly ravenous, feral, and the worst possible thing happens. Now rumors are trending through the festival and Zoey and her friends need to figure out what’s going on.

This was a good YA supernatural thriller with a couple interesting twists. Ghouls are kind of like mainstreamed zombies in this world and they need flesh or they become feral. I liked how we received a bit of each characters back story. The diversity in this story rocked. This was a unique and engaging read. Fun stuff.

I DNF’d this 20% through. I don’t have anything bad to say, I’m learning YA books are not for me. In the future, I’m going to stop seeking them out as most of the time they can’t hold my attention.

If the publisher reaches out and has a preference that I post this review to Goodreads, I will, but I don’t usually post books I DNF.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advanced copy.

Sorry! I did this review a month ago in Goodreads and forgot to post it in here.

Ps: This is a translated version of the original review posted on Goodreads (And my website)

Score: 3.5 Stars.

I met Kayla a couple of years ago, before she even published her debut novel “My Dearest Darkest,” when I volunteered for the Boston Teen Author Festival, a youth literature festival she helped organize. Although we were never close, I'm glad to see how her projects have come to fruition and when I saw that the ARC for "This Delicious Death" was available on Netgalley, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to read it.

This Delicious Death takes place just after a disease called "Hollow" has attacked the American population. This disease is completely terrifying: It turns those who suffer from it (called ghouls) into cannibals, who must constantly eat human flesh to avoid getting out of control.

Because of this, synthetic meat was developed in this reality, which simulates human meat, but which is developed 100% in laboratories. This thanks to the fact that scientists discovered that, by eating this new meat, the Ghouls can return to having a normal life.

Once this context is clear, I can tell you about the plot at hand: A group of four girls (Ghouls) are very excited because they will attend a very important music festival in California, which resumes operations after the Hollow pandemic. Being Ghouls, their car's trunk is full of synthetic meat to avoid any problem or slip up in the event. They practically have everything under control.

However, someone is distributing a drug that, upon contact with the Ghouls, causes them to completely lose control and become feral, to the point that they even attack other Ghouls, something that did not happen during the Hollow. Zoey, Celeste, Jasmine and Valeria find themselves in the middle of this mess and must find out who is behind it all and how they can stop it.

I have to admit that the characters didn't connect with me at the beginning of the book, and it makes perfect sense. Even so, as the pages turned and the reading progressed, the mystery behind the attacks and the latent danger that each of the girls experienced caught my interest for the story.

Although this is a horror novel, I would consider it more like science fiction, especially since it focuses on the consequences of an extremely dangerous disease and because both the virus and the possible solution to the plot problem are backed by scientific research. made by some characters.

I also liked how the author reflected the social responses to the disease and those who suffered from it. The reader cannot help but feel identified with some scenes, especially after having experienced a pandemic such as Covid-19. In this case, several people feel a deep fear, disgust and hatred towards the Ghouls, and consider that they should not live a normal life together with the uninfected. Several characters are in charge of expressing their point of view on this topic, which gives a stronger social background to the story.

This delicious death is an entertaining story to read between two giant billets or novels. This is a book you can sit down to enjoy without overthinking things. It fully meets its objective: Entertain.

Wow! I really really enjoyed this book! It was so different from every other post apocalypse. It was amazing I couldn’t put it down. I loved Zoey Celeste Valeria and Jasmine their friendship was lovely. They were well written characters that felt real. The whole story was well written and interesting totally one of a kind a must read. I can not recommend this enough it was brilliant !!

Enjoyed this unexpectedly delicious novel; devoured it in only two sittings. Compelling, likable characters in a story ripe with meaning and application.

If you enjoy YA novels and zombies, this is an okay book for you. I struggled to connect with the characters but the overall story was intriguing. I loved the diversity of the characters but the story felt slow at times.

I didn't like the story!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This book was so witty and clever! The characters were interesting and relatable (which is funny because they're zombies). After a sickness turns parts of the population into zombies (the Hollowing), the human race has to learn how to adapt. Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine were not all friends before the Hollowing, but it gave them all something in common. They mostly became outcasts after their classmates found out they were zombies. They all want to have a little bit of fun before they go off to live separate lives when they graduate high school, what could be a better way to do that to go to a music festival?? But at the festival they soon find out that someone is targeting zombies and making them feral, more dangerous and humans are starting to die. Will Zoey and her friends be able to solve the mystery without going feral themselves ?

Appreciated the content warnings. This was a fun read. I loved the premise - I haven’t seen a post-virus apocalypse book written from this point of view and I really enjoyed it.