The premise was great and the world really captured my interest. It's a similar set-up to The Forest of Hands and Teeth -- people living in fenced towns years after the zombie apocalypse. I liked this world better, though. People could move through the zombie-infested wilderness, even if most chose not to. People choosing (or being forced) to survive on their own outside the safe areas. People having a complicated emotional response to what happened, recognizing that these "monsters" were people they had known and loved. 
 The world had fun details: the trading cards, the carpet coats, the erosion artists. And I freely admit to having a little crush on Tom Imura (who is way closer to my age than most characters in YA novels!). I thought the relationship between Tom and Benny was well thought-out and realistically complicated, if a little ham-handed in execution. 
 It's that ham-handedness I had the most problems with. A very large portion of this book is made up of people talking. My god, how they talk. They tell long stories about things that happened fifteen years ago, they discuss their philosophical and ethical viewpoints in excruciating (and somewhat repetitive) detail, they engage in Socratic dialogue when there are bounty hunters just over the ridge doing gruesome and horrible things. The book could have been shortened by a quarter - easily - without losing any actual content, simply by condensing the conversations. Much that is spelled out could have been made subtler. 
 It's wordy. There's so much interesting in this book, but it's nearly drowned out by all the blah-de-blah. 
 I'd read a sequel, though. I could see the sequel being a bit less preachy, now that the author has done all the worldbuilding legwork.