This is one of the grimmest books I've read in a long time. One Yellow Eye is clearly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic that happened in real life, however thankfully does not rely on too many overt similarities beyond a pandemic is happening.

This book takes place in present day London where there was an outbreak of a disease that turned people into zombies, however the virus was swiftly eliminated by the military and in some awful circumstances, family and friends, swiftly killing the infected. By the time Kesta Shelley, a hospital employee turned researcher, begins working on a cure for the virus all of the infected are supposed to be dead. Except her husband Tim who is dead on paper, but kept locked in a room while Kesta works to cure him.

The science in this book is very interesting and I learned about a real life horrific neurological disease that affects snakes, and it was interesting to read about how viruses make the jump from human to animal, however the book didn't completely explain how this happened within their world. I liked that the zombies weren't completely stereotypical undead monsters so the plot seemed a lot more plausible from a scientific perspective.

Some of the characters were very two dimensional and it seemed like Kesta had a lot of "plot armor" to get away with keeping her zombie husband locked up for so long. It was confusing as to how she was able to do that since Kesta was completely falling apart psychologically throughout the book (which makes sense), although on the other hand, the plot was making the point about how fearful and isolated folks can be, not only just off the end of a zombie apocalypse, but generally in a society that is becoming more and more disconnected from each other socially.

The plot behind the lab Kesta ends up working in seemed a little cartoonish and again, she has lots of plot armor with her actions, however it was interesting to see the dynamic with those working for find a cure and those with more nefarious intentions.

Overall the main idea behind this book was to investigate how far a person would go to save the love of their life, which the author notes in the afterward. I didn't think that was entirely gotten across since we never really get to know Kesta's husband Tim as a non-zombie. Much of the non-science plot centers around how Kesta never cultivated any relationships aside from her university best friend Jess because she was so focused on her work and relied on Tim for everything else.

She does finally develop real relationships at the end and has some character growth however that wasn't fully fleshed out and was written more in an "and this is what happened next" manner. I think this book worked best as a body horror/psychological thriller than a book about love and relationships.

I rounded my review up to 4 stars because despite my issues with some of the plot, it was still very well written and compelling.

Many thanks to Gallery Books and to NetGalley for this ARC to review. This review is my honest opinion.

Engaging, entertaining, and an original take on zombies. A recommended purchase for collections where genre bent dystopian/horror is popular.

One Yellow Eye

I did not, not like the book. I just couldn’t get into it.
There was a great premise that was not solely focusing on surviving a constant zombie apocalypse, moving on, and rebuilding while hoping it doesn’t restart again.
What for lack of a better term that turned me off was that the main character Kesta kept her undead husband “alive” drugged up and hoping for a cure. That is what happens in the first chapter, but what does it accomplish? Maybe a spark of the person is still inside or basic animalistic tendencies. I am not trying to hate on this, but shifting from hoping to reverse the damage and continuing a marriage to government conspiracy. It was hard to see a semi happy medium.
I did appreciate the empathy and Kesta’s willingness to fight for what was left of her husband. I hope other people give this a try and enjoy it.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the ebook in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 rating: This was such an interesting take on a zombie sci-fi book, with little bits of love & humor mixed in! The portrayal of the infected & the back story of how it occurred was so interesting, the lab parts were so intriguing & didn’t falter. The character development with the FMC held throughout slow & steady, at the end which was really plausible.

There were bits & pieces where events seemed to veer off in a way, one part would be brought up & never really mentioned again. I also feel like some situations in itself could’ve been portrayed a little bit better, such as more background or being more in depth with the scenarios. Overall, it was an adventurous read & it was a refreshing take on this type of dystopia as well!

2.5/5 Two stars feels a little harsh, because this book does have a few things going for it. It's a novel take on...zombie psychology? Ontology? I don't know - it has a different look at zombies. It captures post-pandemic and caretaker anxieties quite well. The story's unique, too, and the look at the research can be fun. A good chunk of the book (mostly the middle third or so) rolls around quite nicely. It's not unenjoyable...

But

It has some major flaws:

1) The protagonist, Kesta, is unlikable, and I don't think she's meant to be. There's nothing appealing here, so as we watch her fall into obsession, it's hard to even root for her (if we're supposed to). The author's said that the book is about the lengths we'd go to to save a loved one, but it too often doesn't read that way. Kesta comes across as cruel and deranged, and there's a better book inside this one about the damage her obsession and desperation does to her. We don't have enough of an emotional connection to feel sympathetic, and she ends up looking more mad than desperate. An alternate version would have taken this story as a tragedy, as one woman's pride leading to a crisis.

2) The love story at the center of the book doesn't work at all. We're repeatedly told that Kesta and Tim have a great relationship, but we never, ever see it. Weaving more of the past into the novel would have helped tremendously.

3) There's an entire mystery subplot that goes nowhere. At all. I'm not sure if the it was supposed to have ended at what felt like a midway point or if the author just forgot to wrap it up.

4) The pacing is off. It's not tense enough for an action/thriller/whatever story, or affecting enough for a love story. Radford's prose is functional and unproblematic, but it's also unvaried. More sense of rhythm could have heightened suspense.

5) The minor characters are the most interesting people (Cooke especially), but are still sometimes hard to get a read on. I never decided what I thought of Jess.

6) There's a major plothole. <spoiler>Much of the narrative involves Kesta trying to get home in time to sedate Tim, or at least checking in on him through her phone. When she's comatose for 5 days, it doesn't seem to matter. He should have been raging in the room. I can think of a workaround (the magic Reanimator semi-cure), but it ignores a major structure of the rest of the novel.</spoiler>

7) The ending is...iffy. It's formally satisfying, but I'm not convinced it follows the internal logic of the novel. It sort of does, so this isn't even a full-on complaint, but I think it could have been handled better.

In short, there are a lot of promising ideas here, but I don't think Radford puts them all together effectively (and I think some stricter editing could have solved some of the issues). It's a first novel, and feels like it, so it will still be interesting to see what she does from here.

I really liked how refreshing it was for a zombie book however it fell short on quite a few things.
It was in the middle of a romance but without "proving" the romance to empathize with her descent to madness and i kept waiting for the consequences of the journalism plot and it look like it got dropped as soon as it wasn't needed to fill anymore.
The "secret" lab that everyone in the world knows where it is felt a little ridiculous.
Though I really liked the scientific research mixed with real disease it was interesting to follow and kept me enjoying the book
Overall I enjoyed reading it and had a good time but it has a lot of flaws as soon as you think about it

So this was terrible in a really unique set of ways. Part of it was that a lot of it dialogue and plot points are just eye-rolling for lack of a better word. People don't talk like this, and the way some things are set up feels like a teenager imagining Big Important Conversations. People's motivations were childish, silly, and sometimes confusing, shifting based on the needs of the plot. Every now and then a disembodied narrative voice parachutes in at the beginning of a chapter to offer some weird musings that add nothing. Some commentary the narrating voice offers is just absurd like "a licensed counsellor, able to stick a fancy title in front of her name, hadn't the faintest idea how to navigate grief when it plunged as deeply as this" after a grieving widow expressed... suicidal thoughts. Suicidal thoughts are perhaps one of the most common reasons people seek counseling? It's extraordinarily common for people not otherwise depressed to feel suicidal while grieving a loved one? That would not be shocking to anyone, least of all a licensed therapist.

A lot of these issues reflect a more central and profound thematic problem, which is the novel itself doesn't see Kesta as an unreliable, and indeed monstrous, narrator. Kesta is so catastrophically, myopically selfish both in and outside her grief, and her selfishness makes her truly cruel and manipulative to everyone around her. When the "reveal" of Tim, kept catatonic and captive with open sores over his body from restraints, happened at the beginning of the novel I actually gasped. Calling him "darling" and engaging in these sick pantomimes as she tortures him over months and months, becoming sicker and more physically grotesque herself was such an incredible set up for what I imagined would be a climactic inversion of the unreliable narration—either Kesta finally sees her monstrousness and the torture she's enacted on the person she was supposed to cherish and has to grapple with it, or there's a narrative slippage where we see Kesta through someone else (POV shift or someone's reaction through Kesta's POV). The tragedy would be either Kesta having to cope with her own guilt and shame, or us, the readers, having to know she's irredeemable and has made her husband justifiably hate her. The absurdity of a lot of the plot then makes sense—of course Kesta thinks her grief is so special and unique that no one could ever fathom it, even therapists or other people that have lost their spouses in the exact same way. Of course Kesta thinks she's so intelligent and important that her personal intervention is necessary to make these scientific advancements. Of course her friend is self-centered and annoying for correctly recognizing that she's severely mentally ill and everyone is in love with her. Of course tricking random men in a bar into being test subjects for an illegitimate trial is just the kind of sacrifice necessary for scientific advancement. But the novel doesn't just not go there, it actively reinforces that Kesta is correct and her interpretation of events is true. It's a bit unsettling that the author seems to think the main character is sympathetic and correct? Even her misinterpretation about Tim is revealed to be that he's exclusively motivated by spreading the virus, not that she tortured his corpse for months because she can't handle her own self-imposed isolation.

I gave it two stars instead of one because there was some interesting writing in it and I've certainly read worse, but both at the thematic level and the smaller level of interlocking plot points and characterization it was a one.

One Yellow Eye is unlike any other zombie story I’ve ever read. Instead of being thrown into brain-splattering zombie-killing action, the story is set in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak. Our main character is a scientist called Kesta, who is dedicated to finding a cure for the disease. But she isn’t just working out of the kindness of her heart; her zombified husband, Tim, is locked up in the spare bedroom.

I really enjoyed the storyline which focused on Kesta’s work in the not-so-secret underground lab. I found the science angle fascinating and Kesta having a personal reason to push the boundaries really worked. However, I do think that the storyline at home could have been a bit stronger. While Kesta’s messy mental state was vividly etched, I thought her relationship with Tim needed more fleshing out. As well as wishing I could have been let in on what made their relationship worth going to such extreme measures to try to save, I also think there could have been higher stakes than neighbours occasionally calling in noise complaints.

Overall, the story was an interesting reflection on grief, but I would have liked a harder emotional punch!

3.5 stars rounded down.

Unintentionally, this is the second zombie book I’ve read in three weeks and it’s interesting that both did something to zombies that most authors don’t - had them retain their human consciousness on some level. Maybe because both were written by women and both were exploring the boundaries of love rather than true zombie logistics.

I made a promise to myself to be pickier about what I choose to read this year and I’m hugely disappointed that this book fell short of a 4 star rating for me. It moved so slowly, and walked a rather uninteresting path between love story and zombie sci-fi. It really needed to be wholly one or the other.

As far as how much Kesta loved her husband, it was portrayed mostly through desperation and an unwillingness to let go. But we weren’t ever given a really good picture of what it was she was refusing to let go of. A happy marriage? Ok…but show us what made it special. Instead, there were a couple of anecdotes from side characters telling us how much they loved him, but we weren’t ever given a chance to get to actually know him. In the end, although we were to be convinced she acted out of love, it was clear to me that she put her unwillingness to be without him before her willingness to show him mercy or even to consider the torturous existence she had imprisoned him in. Doesn’t sound like love to me.

When we weren’t at home with her caretaking her husband’s shell, we were at the lab with Kesta, where she was living out the sci-fi part of the story for a (not at all) secret government organization that was both tasked with finding a cure and with basically weaponizing the virus. Sounds exciting, right? It wasn’t. It was wildly far fetched and unrealistic, even with allowing for the imagining of something that has never happened…where was the security? The protocol? The hierarchy? It was easy to sneak in and out, one small man was in charge, and very little was actually being accomplished for much of the book. And seemingly everyone, including other countries, knew exactly what they project was, what it was called and where its secret location was.

Add a couple of loose ends to the mix (what happened to the journalist storyline?) and this book fell a little flat for me. All that being said, I enjoyed reading it mostly because I expected something huge to be coming for most of the book. When I realized it wasn’t going to happen, I found myself at the end, so I suppose you could say it kept me interested.

It was a decent effort, but I really wish it could go back to the drawing board and improved before publishing.

One Yellow Eye is the first in my "zombie/love story". Leigh Radford's writing style is truly refreshing and memorable. I wish to see more of her work. A reflective, heartbreaking and terrifying story about how far you would go for the ones you love. I recommend this to fans of Dystopian/ Horror genre.

3.5 stars. This story has good heart, with believable characters. Our lead has an astute sense of self, and a conviction that leads the plot from the start. Unfortunately, lackluster pacing and minimal action combined with the lead’s depressive state throughout the book make it difficult for the reader to stave off boredom. The climax and conclusion were standout points of romantic gesture and poignancy; however, these high points are muddied by rambling prose paired with the aforementioned lack of action.

This story takes a deep look into how a horrific situation can affect humans emotionally and morally. It is a very different addition to the zombie genre and dives into the science behind what could cause an event such as a zombie apocalypse. I really enjoyed it, however I found the lab scenes while important to the plot, to be a bit boring and drag. I wanted the story to get into the nitty gritty and felt at times there was a bit too much of the science aspect causing the story to lose some emotion and intrigue. In all, I found it to be well written and heart-wrenching.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for providing this book, with my honest review below.

Kesta is a brilliant scientist and deeply love in with her husband Tim. She seems lucky, maybe, but once you understand that all her experience has been funneled towards finding a cure for the recent zombie virus, and her husband Tim is possibly the sole surviving zombie in London, hidden by Kesta, all that luckiness loses it’s shine. Kesta’s love for her husband pushes away her friends, sets her on a path to work with a morally dubious group working on the cure, and ultimately puts the world back at risk for a resurgence of the zombie apocalypse - maybe unforgivable, but Leigh Radford’s description of what love does to us and for us shines because of all that.

One Yellow Eye is a story that carries with it a quiet dread given the circumstances but I couldn’t disagree that I might do the same for those I love. The descriptions of how people had to otherwise deal with their loved ones that had the virus was chilling, and the ending and events with Tim were everything I would never have expected them to be, but so beautifully done. Whether you’re into zombies or not this story about love and what we sacrifice for it and the drive it imbues us with is well worth the read.

I really enjoyed this! Full transparency, as I was drawn to this title because of the cover art, and I'm a horror/thriller/mystery junkie. I will certainly keep an eye out for this author as I was instantly drawn into the world she created and invested in Kesta's life.
One Yellow Eye is a novel that takes place after a zombie apocalypse, particularly a Dr. named Kesta and her dead husband locked in the bedroom. In this world setting all zombies were killed with no exception, but as a Dr. Kesta thinks she can cure him and does everything in her power to do so.

I won't get into any of the finer points, but One Yellow Eye felt different from other zombie books I have read, and one person can do with enough determination.