Everything I Know about Zombies, I Learned in Kindergarten

2014 IndieFab Award Winner in Multicultural Adult Fiction

Everything I Know About Zombies is that highly agreeable thing: a book for adults (please don't give it to your nine-year-old) about children, written largely from a child's viewpoint, that is not at all childish. That's quite a clever balancing act to perform, and one at which far more experienced authors have failed.
I loved, too, the extremely deft narrative voice, its shifts in dialect with point of view, its wry, sometimes ironic, tone. Moreover, the book gives itself the space to use its characters to explore ideas, important ideas about race, and society, and parenting, about self-sufficiency and inter-dependence and violence. And that's where the fiction starts holding up a mirror to reality, and why - over and above the wonderful Letitia - I think this is a book (and a genre) worth reading. --Harriet Goodchild, Heroines of Fantasy (unstarred)


For adults, and perhaps young adult readers, it is a stellar addition to the zombie genre, at once page-turning and lyrical. Without scaring off genre readers, Everything I Know could be classified as a literary novel. Williams is an expert with dialect and the inner city setting. Letitia is a fully-realized protagonist, both mature and vulnerable. Yet, she's not impossibly mature. She really does seem like a nine-year-old, albeit a more street smart nine-year-old who's already had children in her care ... the portrayal of kids in this situation could have veered towards sentimentality, but it doesn't, because their reactions seem entirely realistic. So Williams' apocalypse is both more harrowing, and more human ... there is plenty here to satisfy genre lovers, which is a testament to how well it straddles the line between gory genre and literature. --Henry Baum, Self-Publishing Reviews (5 stars)

Make no mistake, this isn't a children's book about zombies. It's violent, graphic and more of a horror novel than anything else. This is definitely a book to join some of the classic zombie novels. --
Ross Rojek, San Francisco Book Review (5 stars)


If you like horror and you're looking for something new, this is undoubtedly it. I applaud Williams for the excellent new spin he's put on the zombie genre. He's certainly convinced me that in the end, when the apocalypse brings out the worst in adults, it will be the children who save us; that is, if they don't kill us first. -- Carol Taylor, African-American Literary Book Club (unstarred)

Everything I Know About Zombies, I Learned in Kindergarten is a dark horror novel, recommended for adult (or possibly older teen) readers due to savage violence. When a zombie apocalypse descended upon nine-year-old Letitia Johnson, she tried to hide from it, along with her little sister and her classmates, locking themselves in a school bathroom. They hid for five days while their teachers and classmates were killed, and the Bronx w...