Retelling: As Lily becomes more involved in the lives of her friends' science fiction novels, her mother experiences the foreboding realization that her own role in the stories might be a grim one. Mothers in books, after all, tend not to have the best outcomes. She packs up her bags and travels to a town where she believes she will be safe as they have the lowest death rate. As it turns out, they can't die because they are already ghosts and zombies. In a series of surprising twists and turns, the crazy crew of young people that attempt to save her implement a dangerous plan to exorcise the quirky ghost of a Hollywood has-been and it frequently fails in delightfully funny ways.

Thoughts and feelings: The BEST chapter in this book is the one where the author breaks the forth wall to explain how he came up with the names of designer clothing to support the fashionista character, Madigan, Katie's upper-west side cousin. SO FUNNY. You must read this author.

If an M.T. Anderson book makes you laugh out loud in no one is around to hear it, is it still funny?

This is more like it-- Zombie Mommy is no Whales on Stilts or The Flame-Pits of Delaware, but it's a fun, rollicking satire of horror tropes, not to mention heists. I particularly loved it when Lily's mother determines that she's going to die because in YA novels, the mothers of the protagonists always die.

Zombie Mommy is not nearly as clever or loopy as the rest in the Pals in Peril series, but all of the elements that made me fall in love with this hilarious self-aware parody of genre conventions is still evident in Book Five. I think by this point in the series it is starting to fall prey to its own formula (kind of ironic, no?), but it's worth a read if you liked any of the others. Longer review to come. ( )