The Day I Died

Apocalypse Cycle

By: Aya Knight

Narrated by: Diana Kiester

Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

Oshin Fletcher lives by three rules: Obey authority, don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself, and above all else, never leave the city walls.

Some say that rules are meant to be broken. For Oshin, her world shattered on the day she was betrayed. A secret meeting leads her beyond the safety of her city. Lured by the ignorance that comes with being lonely and hopeful, Oshin was about to discover just how severe consequences could be. Lost and alone, she waited; no one came. But they did. The infected, the decaying, the undead.

Oshin wakes to find herself in an abandoned house, deep within the forest. Her body was changing, her desire to feed, uncontrollable. She was a marionette - her hunger, the puppeteer. She pivots on a line between life and death. They say the undead are mindless, but Oshin was very much aware. She sets out in an unknown world where the worst evils aren’t the undead, but humanity itself. With only days before the effects of the disease take hold and decay sets in, Oshin must race to find a way back home for a cure. She soon discovers that home is not everything she thought it to be. Dark secrets have been in play since the moment she was born.

An emotionally intense zombie survival story.

©2019 Aya Knight (P)2020 Aya Knight

Critic reviews

"The Day I Died is a riveting teen dystopian sci-fi story...Absorbing, revealing, and at once familiar in theme, yet original in its rendition...Never could [Oshin] have imagined what is to come - and, neither will the reader. " (D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review)

"Knight's novel delivers a tense and atmospheric story about a protagonist's chilling transformation into one of the undead." (Booklife by Publishers Weekly)

Didn't ever want to pause it.

This book was an excellent read/listen. The story in the beginning seemed like it was going to be generic but it took me by suprise multiple times everytime I thought I had it figured out. What seems to me like the mixture of at least 4 different genres in one book was done so perfectly. I smiled, cringed, gasped and awww'd so many different times. I recommend this to anybody searching for a book that won't eat up a year to listen to. It has something in it for everybody.

The only cons in this book I can think of are that the narrator for about the first 45 minutes was very monotone and paid little attention to flow but after that initial 45 minutes she figures it out pretty well.
The ending seems to be setting up for at minimum one more book and I wish there were a way to reach out to the author to ask about it.

Overall I highly enjoyed this book.