I really wanted to rate this higher because The First Days is basically all I've ever wanted in a novel, and in a zombie novel, especially. We got two women from different walks of life who save each other and become best friends; we got a real-live bisexual character, a teen boy who doesn't make me want to kill him, and a town of people who are diverse enough that I can tell them apart but they aren't bent on self-destruction. I feel like if I had a "everything I want in an apocalypse novel" checklist, Frater went and checked all of my boxes. 
 My issue, however, starts at about chapter two and goes through out the entire book: it's too glossy when it comes to trauma, especially Jenni's trauma. For most of the book, Katie seemed to be pretty fleshed out but Jenni is a stereotype in so many ways other than her devotion to Katie and her stepson. Jenni does start to become her own character towards the end (we find out she speaks Spanish, her mother was Mexican) so I do have hope for the rest of the series. 
 Being a self-published book, there are a lot of the problems inherent in this subset of books: grammar errors, sentences that aren't as clear as they should be, amateur formatting. I won't let this stop me from reading the rest of the series, because there's a lot of potential here, and for those of us who want kickass women doing awesome things while surviving zombies, well, there are fewer options than there should be.