Favorite Epidemic/Disease

I love books about epidemics and diseases and plagues. A lot of really great YA that I enjoy revolves around that theme. The Maze Runner series comes to mind because I'm currently finishing the series. There are some great ones outside of YA, too: The Stand, I Am Legend, World War Z, even The Martian Chronicles has a few. I even wrote a couple myself for NaNoWriMo (Epilogue and Comorbidity). But my favorite? I guess I'd have to go with...

...Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick. You may remember us reviewing this from a while back, so I won't go into too much detail. I was totally sucked into the book from the beginning and I had to - JUST HAD TO - finish the series. (That happens sometimes with me and this blog... See above, where I said I'm still working through the last of the Maze Runner series.) But there are great books I listed above that I didn't choose for my favorite because I'm focusing on the disease aspect. I like the disease in Ashes because of how we really don't know exactly how it works, but we piece it together by observing the effects. I like that it varies in people with various types of brain damage. I like that we don't really need an explanation of how something we assume to be the world's largest EMP could cause this disease (which technically is not a disease, I suppose, but it acts very much like one). And I like that the technicality of not being a disease makes it so that it isn't infectious, and can't be caught, giving you the ability to experience much tenser, scarier, up-close scenes without having to find a way not to infect the wrong character.

I'm going to do something that doesn't happen a lot on this blog:  I'm going to tell you about a book that we've never mentioned on here.  Not once. (In fact, I had to create a new tag for it because we've never had a author with the last name U.  Exciting day, here at Review Me Twice.)

I read this book a REALLY long time ago (like... middle school long time ago.)  But even after all these years, and only reading it the one time, the plot still stands out very vividly in my mind.  This girl goes off to this camp, a camp where they completely cut themselves off from the outside world.  It was supposed to be a survival camp, so they had no interaction (and it was the '90s.  There weren't things like cell phones then.)

When she came back, all of England had been ravished by a plague.  Her parents were dead, her best friend was crazy, and she had to pair up with this guy that she kind of always hated.  And this was before the whole Zombie craze started, so people just got sick and died.  No coming back, no fighting off monsters, just plain old everyone is sick and we don't know how to stop it.

I really enjoyed the book and this post made me think about it again.  I feel like if it's stuck so vividly in my memory all these years, they it definitely deserves a shout out.  (also, below is the cover that I saw as a kid and the only picture of that cover I could find.  This book really tested the powers of my google-fu.)

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