The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Series: The Forest of Hands and Teeth #1
Publisher: Delacorte Press 2009
Genre: Horror
Sub-genre: YA post-apocalyptic fiction
Rating: 2 pints of blood
This is the paperback cover here in Canada. It's sufficiently spooky, perhaps more so than the drawn cover of the hardback, with the tree branches stretching out like skeletal fingers - but I'm not keen on the girl or the MTV look. I strongly doubt that she'd have access to so much mascara in a post-apocalyptic world, living in a village in the middle of a forest. Actually, make that zero mascara.
It bugs me, it really does. Want to hear what else bugs me? Yeah, I'm sorry, it's one of those reviews.
For a long time I had no interest in reading this book, not until the paperback came out (making it look like a new book with its different cover) and I finally read the blurb - maybe it was a new blurb, but it sounded so interesting I promptly changed my mind. Frankly, it sounded like the movie The Village, which I adore - a bit too much really; I wondered whether it was a copy-cat or not. Isolated, self-sufficient village in the middle of a forest, in this case surrounded by fences and horror stories to keep the villagers from straying.
I wouldn't call it a rip-off, though the similarities in the setup are definitely there. From the very beginning we understand that there is a very real danger in the Forest of Hands and Teeth: zombies. They're called "unconsecrated" and they beat at the wire fences, hungering for the villagers who believe they're the only ones left.
Mary sits with her mother by the fence each afternoon, watching the Unconsecrated. Her mother is looking for her husband - where he went and why is never explained, but the day Mary is late to attend her mother is the day her mother is bitten. Mary and her older brother Jed are orphaned; Jed has his young pregnant wife and turns Mary away, leaving her with no other choice but to join the Sisterhood in the old church.
It is soon clear that the Sisterhood harbours secrets, especially when Mary discovers that someone has arrived at their village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth - someone the Sisters have locked away and kept hidden. But Mary learns of her anyway: Gabrielle, her name is. But she disappears before Mary can find out more, and then turns up outside the fence as an Unconsecrated.
If I give any more of a summary I'll end up telling the entire plot, so I'll stop there. It began promisingly, and even though I felt no connection, sympathy or even interest in Mary, I was still interested in the story to keep going. That interest waned about halfway through when it became apparent there was nothing very deep going on here. Secrets are implied, then revealed to be only what you'd figured out already - a bare surface scratching. There are no deeper plots here. It wouldn't need them, if instead it were a character story. But it isn't, though it tries to be.
I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with this book as I write this. It reminds me of the fail of Meg Rosoff's much-touted How I Live Now. Mary is the narrator, and she's a fairly accurate description of a teenager I suppose - but definitely one who's more in keeping with today's teens. There's just something about her that's off. It could be her selfishness, but that's a classic teen trait isn't it. I don't begrudge her that, though even after she realises and acknowledges how selfish she is, nothing changes.
It could be that she's simply too flimsy a character to hold any weight. Who is Mary? What does she look like? Why does she love Travis so much? Why does she want so desperately to reach the ocean? That is sort of explained but it was a bit thin. I didn't feel any real chemistry between her and Travis - it felt fake, and I didn't trust Travis because of it (turns out, he's the better of the two). Why does Travis's older brother Harry love Mary so much? What's so bloody appealing about Mary? I couldn't sympathise with her at all, and the entire story required me to care. Also, what are we supposed to infer from her living alone with Travis in that house for all that time? Are we meant to understand that they're sleeping together - with, I'm sure, no protection - or that they're sweetly chaste? Neither makes me comfortable.
There were what could be plotholes, or simply an absence of an explanation that would explain some little details that otherwise jar or are implausible or make no sense. A sense of reality - and hence believability - is lost when you skip details. Like, getting the dog, Argos, out of the attic and into the treehouse was difficult, but getting him out of the treehouse, along the rope and over the fence while the tree was on fire must have been a sinch since the dog was conveniently forgotten in this scene. What disappointed me the most perhaps was how the village and its occupants weren't fleshed out at all. Aside from Mary, we meet Travis, Harry and their sister Beth who married Mary's brother Jed; Mary's best friend Cass; Sister Tabitha and Mary's mother (briefly). There's also Gabrielle, and a little boy called Jacob. Since Mary is narrating, we get only what she thinks is important enough to tell us - which isn't much. We get no real understanding of her village, what it looks like, how it operates, how it sustains itself, the roles people have, who else lives there. And the characters we do meet, we never get to really know - they're all cardboard cutouts of basic characters, which makes it near impossible to care about any of them.
I found it hard to believe in a character who lived in such a small, community-focused place, where she would have had a practical role to play for the survival of the village just like everyone else, but who didn't spare a thought for anyone or anything beyond herself and her own meagre interests. How did she contribute? She wasn't helping to grow food, she didn't make things, she didn't help with children. I have no idea what she did with her time apart from one reference to washing. Well they all have to do washing. That hardly counts. The setting lacked conviction. It lacked reality. Any good writer of Fantasy knows that the key is to make the world believable; with such a firm foundation you can introduce all manner of alien concepts etc. Spend some time in the beginning to establish the setting and the people, really flesh it out, and then we can really care. With zombies pressing on the fences every day, with loved ones lost to the undead, these people can expect sympathy, but they got none from me.
It's told in present tense, which should be the perfect tense for this story, but I honestly found it to be too obvious, too under-utilised. Like other stories improperly using present tense, it reads like past tense and strips the story of the very sense of immediacy it was meant to bestow. Present tense isn't an easy tense to use well. It should transport you to the heart of things, to the very moment, but here it doesn't. In fact, it distanced me.
Overall, it was hugely disappointing. I began it thinking "oh yay, a good one finally!" only to change my mind after several chapters of not much. I've thought of another one it reminds me of: Life As We Knew It. They have similar disappointing characteristics. The Forest of Hands and Teeth is annoying me more the more I think about it so now's probably a good time to stop talking about it. I worry though. Is YA fiction becoming a bit ... lame? I will have to reread some that I enjoyed as a teen, and see if there's really that much difference in writing style and skill.
Publisher: Delacorte Press 2009
Genre: Horror
Sub-genre: YA post-apocalyptic fiction
Rating: 2 pints of blood
This is the paperback cover here in Canada. It's sufficiently spooky, perhaps more so than the drawn cover of the hardback, with the tree branches stretching out like skeletal fingers - but I'm not keen on the girl or the MTV look. I strongly doubt that she'd have access to so much mascara in a post-apocalyptic world, living in a village in the middle of a forest. Actually, make that zero mascara.
It bugs me, it really does. Want to hear what else bugs me? Yeah, I'm sorry, it's one of those reviews.
For a long time I had no interest in reading this book, not until the paperback came out (making it look like a new book with its different cover) and I finally read the blurb - maybe it was a new blurb, but it sounded so interesting I promptly changed my mind. Frankly, it sounded like the movie The Village, which I adore - a bit too much really; I wondered whether it was a copy-cat or not. Isolated, self-sufficient village in the middle of a forest, in this case surrounded by fences and horror stories to keep the villagers from straying.
I wouldn't call it a rip-off, though the similarities in the setup are definitely there. From the very beginning we understand that there is a very real danger in the Forest of Hands and Teeth: zombies. They're called "unconsecrated" and they beat at the wire fences, hungering for the villagers who believe they're the only ones left.
Mary sits with her mother by the fence each afternoon, watching the Unconsecrated. Her mother is looking for her husband - where he went and why is never explained, but the day Mary is late to attend her mother is the day her mother is bitten. Mary and her older brother Jed are orphaned; Jed has his young pregnant wife and turns Mary away, leaving her with no other choice but to join the Sisterhood in the old church.
It is soon clear that the Sisterhood harbours secrets, especially when Mary discovers that someone has arrived at their village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth - someone the Sisters have locked away and kept hidden. But Mary learns of her anyway: Gabrielle, her name is. But she disappears before Mary can find out more, and then turns up outside the fence as an Unconsecrated.
If I give any more of a summary I'll end up telling the entire plot, so I'll stop there. It began promisingly, and even though I felt no connection, sympathy or even interest in Mary, I was still interested in the story to keep going. That interest waned about halfway through when it became apparent there was nothing very deep going on here. Secrets are implied, then revealed to be only what you'd figured out already - a bare surface scratching. There are no deeper plots here. It wouldn't need them, if instead it were a character story. But it isn't, though it tries to be.
I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with this book as I write this. It reminds me of the fail of Meg Rosoff's much-touted How I Live Now. Mary is the narrator, and she's a fairly accurate description of a teenager I suppose - but definitely one who's more in keeping with today's teens. There's just something about her that's off. It could be her selfishness, but that's a classic teen trait isn't it. I don't begrudge her that, though even after she realises and acknowledges how selfish she is, nothing changes.
It could be that she's simply too flimsy a character to hold any weight. Who is Mary? What does she look like? Why does she love Travis so much? Why does she want so desperately to reach the ocean? That is sort of explained but it was a bit thin. I didn't feel any real chemistry between her and Travis - it felt fake, and I didn't trust Travis because of it (turns out, he's the better of the two). Why does Travis's older brother Harry love Mary so much? What's so bloody appealing about Mary? I couldn't sympathise with her at all, and the entire story required me to care. Also, what are we supposed to infer from her living alone with Travis in that house for all that time? Are we meant to understand that they're sleeping together - with, I'm sure, no protection - or that they're sweetly chaste? Neither makes me comfortable.
There were what could be plotholes, or simply an absence of an explanation that would explain some little details that otherwise jar or are implausible or make no sense. A sense of reality - and hence believability - is lost when you skip details. Like, getting the dog, Argos, out of the attic and into the treehouse was difficult, but getting him out of the treehouse, along the rope and over the fence while the tree was on fire must have been a sinch since the dog was conveniently forgotten in this scene. What disappointed me the most perhaps was how the village and its occupants weren't fleshed out at all. Aside from Mary, we meet Travis, Harry and their sister Beth who married Mary's brother Jed; Mary's best friend Cass; Sister Tabitha and Mary's mother (briefly). There's also Gabrielle, and a little boy called Jacob. Since Mary is narrating, we get only what she thinks is important enough to tell us - which isn't much. We get no real understanding of her village, what it looks like, how it operates, how it sustains itself, the roles people have, who else lives there. And the characters we do meet, we never get to really know - they're all cardboard cutouts of basic characters, which makes it near impossible to care about any of them.
I found it hard to believe in a character who lived in such a small, community-focused place, where she would have had a practical role to play for the survival of the village just like everyone else, but who didn't spare a thought for anyone or anything beyond herself and her own meagre interests. How did she contribute? She wasn't helping to grow food, she didn't make things, she didn't help with children. I have no idea what she did with her time apart from one reference to washing. Well they all have to do washing. That hardly counts. The setting lacked conviction. It lacked reality. Any good writer of Fantasy knows that the key is to make the world believable; with such a firm foundation you can introduce all manner of alien concepts etc. Spend some time in the beginning to establish the setting and the people, really flesh it out, and then we can really care. With zombies pressing on the fences every day, with loved ones lost to the undead, these people can expect sympathy, but they got none from me.
It's told in present tense, which should be the perfect tense for this story, but I honestly found it to be too obvious, too under-utilised. Like other stories improperly using present tense, it reads like past tense and strips the story of the very sense of immediacy it was meant to bestow. Present tense isn't an easy tense to use well. It should transport you to the heart of things, to the very moment, but here it doesn't. In fact, it distanced me.
Overall, it was hugely disappointing. I began it thinking "oh yay, a good one finally!" only to change my mind after several chapters of not much. I've thought of another one it reminds me of: Life As We Knew It. They have similar disappointing characteristics. The Forest of Hands and Teeth is annoying me more the more I think about it so now's probably a good time to stop talking about it. I worry though. Is YA fiction becoming a bit ... lame? I will have to reread some that I enjoyed as a teen, and see if there's really that much difference in writing style and skill.