I rarely feature blackberries here because they’re not common around Sofia. I usually have to settle with raspberries and blueberries. Blackberries were very common around the city where I grew up (Stara Zagora) and I spent lots of time picking them and getting scratches.
You can actually filter the blackberries from the seeds and make a jam without seeds, which is a delicacy.
The world ended because a virus turned most people into immortal zombie vampires. Durable but not very smart. Allison will try to survive in this hostile environment and preserve a friend here or there. She’ll get herself into a conspiracy of some kind that we will probably uncover in book 3.
The zombie dynamic is about as realistic as the zombie fungus in “The Girl with All the Gifts”. Zombies roam outside of the walled cities, hunting for people. People almost never go out to be eaten. I believe the zombies in a world like that could not last for a hundred years with no humans to renew their ranks and would just die out from hunger. The same applies to the non-zombie vampires, the math doesn’t add up. The vampire lords are very carnivorous and kill so many people that the human race should’ve ended long before the zombies.
Overall, the book is not plausible – if a zombie apocalypse happens, it won’t happen this way. Maybe some other way. Despite that, I liked it and read it quickly. Looking forward to reading the next part. I’d say it was a solid 4*/5.