Coming of Age in the Age of Coming Zombies: A Book Review
Read "The Forest of Hands and Teeth." The main character is a small-town girl whose dreams of greatness are being slowly drowned in a sea of zombies on the other side of the fence.
Oddly, that's how I feel about the book itself. Its dreams of being an interesting character piece and post-apoc adventure story were quickly dragged down and torn to shreds by a crowd of mindless romantic angstbunnies.
Suzanne Collins' Katniss Everdeen was also an angsty teenager in a fenced-in small town after the end of the world, but Katniss was tolerable because she was empathic as a character. Mary I just wanted to spank and send to her room. Her ambitions were explained again and again and again and again but I never felt it. She was selfish and self-absorbed and completely insufferable, which is how teenagers are and not necessarily a bad thing in a slice-of-afterlife piece like this. But she never won me over to her side at all. A total cold fish and that's coming from someone who looks for female protagonists to adore. All the ingredients were there, but she never became cake.
And all the mysteries raised during the course of the book were left hanging while the author devoted paragraphs to agonizing over which brother Mary wanted more. Can this shit not wait while you beat the undead back with shovels? Is this really the best time to be trying on a prom dress?
I dig what she was trying to do with the book, but it was pretty frustrating to wade through once I realized that it was never going to pay off. It felt like I was reading Wicked all over again, and I do not forgive that lightly. Nothing chaps my ass like getting my hopes up over and over again only to have the story stubbornly refuse to pay off. Even Twilight paid off, as much as that hurts to type. It made promises and kept them. Sadly they were promises to do me grave emotional injury and then rub salt in the wound, but you have to admire that kind of follow-through.
The flow of the story had an irritating tendency to take something as high-stakes as a plague of the undead and tell it like a tired salaryman describing a day at the office in excruciating detail for 37 chapters. "And then we went to the other village, and then we hid in the attic, and then we ate food and looked out the window, and then we escaped with our lives..." There were moments of high excitement, but inevitably they turned out to be the punctuation marks between long sentences of water cooler gossip as recounted by Ben Stein.
I hate to diss on a novel that includes a scene of a teen girl dropping a zombie infant out a second story window headfirst. I grew up on Stephen King. My standards aren't incredibly high. I want a good story, well told and evocative. And if you can commit a little infanticide now and again, so much the better! But make me care while you're at it, dammit.
I will never be a grammar or spelling nazi, because I believe in an English language that prefers to be tied up and occasionally tortured with candle wax. That said, there IS such a thing as a safe word. Which is my way of saying that the prose style just didn't do it for me. The writing was awkward and the dialogue could be painful at times. Every clunky turn of phrase broke my immersion just enough that soon I was listening for them as much as the actual story. This is also how I got through the Da Vinci Code, incidentally.
And last of all gripes, an audio-format specific observation: the lady who read the book didn't perform so much as survive it. I would have gotten Christina Moore for the job. She excels at humanizing her roles, and Mary could have used some of that.
In summary, there was some very entertaining stuff in the Forest of Hands and Teeth, but it all built up to a complete literary cocktease and left me feeling annoyed and wistful for the book it could have been. I give it two out of five, score subject to adjustment once I check out the sequel (because I never fucking learn my lesson).
"John!" "Marsha!" "BRAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNNSSSSS"
Oddly, that's how I feel about the book itself. Its dreams of being an interesting character piece and post-apoc adventure story were quickly dragged down and torn to shreds by a crowd of mindless romantic angstbunnies.
Suzanne Collins' Katniss Everdeen was also an angsty teenager in a fenced-in small town after the end of the world, but Katniss was tolerable because she was empathic as a character. Mary I just wanted to spank and send to her room. Her ambitions were explained again and again and again and again but I never felt it. She was selfish and self-absorbed and completely insufferable, which is how teenagers are and not necessarily a bad thing in a slice-of-afterlife piece like this. But she never won me over to her side at all. A total cold fish and that's coming from someone who looks for female protagonists to adore. All the ingredients were there, but she never became cake.
And all the mysteries raised during the course of the book were left hanging while the author devoted paragraphs to agonizing over which brother Mary wanted more. Can this shit not wait while you beat the undead back with shovels? Is this really the best time to be trying on a prom dress?
I dig what she was trying to do with the book, but it was pretty frustrating to wade through once I realized that it was never going to pay off. It felt like I was reading Wicked all over again, and I do not forgive that lightly. Nothing chaps my ass like getting my hopes up over and over again only to have the story stubbornly refuse to pay off. Even Twilight paid off, as much as that hurts to type. It made promises and kept them. Sadly they were promises to do me grave emotional injury and then rub salt in the wound, but you have to admire that kind of follow-through.
The flow of the story had an irritating tendency to take something as high-stakes as a plague of the undead and tell it like a tired salaryman describing a day at the office in excruciating detail for 37 chapters. "And then we went to the other village, and then we hid in the attic, and then we ate food and looked out the window, and then we escaped with our lives..." There were moments of high excitement, but inevitably they turned out to be the punctuation marks between long sentences of water cooler gossip as recounted by Ben Stein.
I hate to diss on a novel that includes a scene of a teen girl dropping a zombie infant out a second story window headfirst. I grew up on Stephen King. My standards aren't incredibly high. I want a good story, well told and evocative. And if you can commit a little infanticide now and again, so much the better! But make me care while you're at it, dammit.
I will never be a grammar or spelling nazi, because I believe in an English language that prefers to be tied up and occasionally tortured with candle wax. That said, there IS such a thing as a safe word. Which is my way of saying that the prose style just didn't do it for me. The writing was awkward and the dialogue could be painful at times. Every clunky turn of phrase broke my immersion just enough that soon I was listening for them as much as the actual story. This is also how I got through the Da Vinci Code, incidentally.
And last of all gripes, an audio-format specific observation: the lady who read the book didn't perform so much as survive it. I would have gotten Christina Moore for the job. She excels at humanizing her roles, and Mary could have used some of that.
In summary, there was some very entertaining stuff in the Forest of Hands and Teeth, but it all built up to a complete literary cocktease and left me feeling annoyed and wistful for the book it could have been. I give it two out of five, score subject to adjustment once I check out the sequel (because I never fucking learn my lesson).
"John!" "Marsha!" "BRAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNNNSSSSS"