"This fresh, funny inclusive YA rom-com reels with confessions of undying love while carnal flesh-munching zombies rampage."
August 2025 Debut of the Month
Radiantly refreshing, Poppy T. Perry’s Dead Real rom-com, zom-com debut revolves around a duo of kiss-ass characters, and a kick-ass concept. Namely, the trickiness (to say the least) that comes of declaring your undying love for your best friend while your hometown is overrun by undying zombies.
“I could gaze adoringly at Ruby for ever. But surely everyone feels like that about their best friend, right”? So shares Nora near the start of this feast of fast-paced YA fiction. Brought together by their shared passion for horror movies, and on the cusp of heading to the same art college, Ruby is determined to lose her virginity before embarking on the next chapter of her life. Nora, however, is grabbling with having all the feels for Ruby.
Into this tangled emotional web comes an emergency alert instructing citizens to STAY INDOORS as a result of a “plague swarming across England…travelling faster than could ever have been predicted”. While the government initially refers to victims as “the infected”, witnessing her elderly neighbour’s “vicious chomping” leads Nora to the clear conclusion that the infected are, in fact, zombies. While staying alive in a world “overrun with flesh- eating monsters” sure won’t be easy, neither is summoning the courage to reveal the deepest secrets of your heart…
Propelled by the pitch-perfect combination of Nora’s whip-smart voice, gasp-worthy gore, and the thrill of a fight to survive, Dead Real is also a dead cool, electrifyingly funny, inclusive story of trying to live your true life (while the wider world is being taken over by the dead!).
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Nora Inkwell is totally, completely, absolutely going to tell her best friend and fellow horror movie superfan, Ruby, that she's in love with her. It doesn't matter that Baxter from Body Combat wrote on the college wall that Nora's frigid. Or that Ruby is more interested in losing her lesbian v-plates before they start university. And it certainly doesn't matter that Nora's old school friends said that all bisexuals are attention-seeking wannabes! ...
It might matter that the entire town has turned into flesh-eating zombies.
Guess there's no time like the (deadly, dangerous, zombie-swamped) present to confess your *undying* love.
The LoveReading4Kids Editorial Team have read and reviewed Dead Real and determined it is suitable for children aged 13-18 years old
Dead Real features in the following genres: Featured Books for 13+ readers, Featured Books for Young Adults, Debuts of the Month, Recommendations, Horror & Ghost Stories, Romance / Relationship Stories, PSHE: Sexuality, Gender and Relationships, Personal Social Health Economic (PSHE), Relating to LGBTQ+ people, Children’s / Teenage personal and social topics: LGBTQ+, Children's and Young Adult Fiction, Children’s, Teenage and Educational, Relating to specific groups and cultures or social and cultural interests, Interest qualifiers
Dead Real is available in Paperback
Dead Real was written by Poppy T. Perry and published by UCLan Publishing
Dead Real has 371 pages
£8.09
