Ryan, Carrie: The Forest of Hands and Teeth
The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009)
Written by: Carrie Ryan
Genre: YA/Horror
Pages: 310
This is a book with a seductive cover, but I never got sucked in by the description. Slowly but surely, though, I started hearing excellent reviews. Most important, I started hearing excellent reviews from readers I trust, like tezmilleroz. I decided to go ahead and give this book a go, and I'm glad I did.
The premise: Mary lives in a world with very strict and sacred rules: the Sisterhood knows best. The Guardians will protect you. The Unconsecrated will never, ever relent. And most important, stay away from the fence that protects you from the Forest of Hands and Teeth, where the Unconsecrated are waiting. But Mary's rules start failing her as she yearns for more than what the village can provide. Love, and a life outside of the Forest that seems as mythic and impossible as God himself. Only to leave the village means death, and Mary has to decide if she's content with her life in the village, which is safe, or if she'll change the world beyond, if there even is such a thing.
In short: it's a book about zombies in which the z-word is never mentioned once.
Spoilers, spoilers, oh the spoilers!
Let me just go ahead and say this is an incredibly impressive debut. The title alone sucks you in, and the prose, once you start reading, is elegant yet stark and to the point. You're inside Mary's head, and her truths are poignant in a way you would never, ever, EVER expect from a character who lives in a world infested with zombies.
Now, I'm not all that familiar with zombies. I've seen a few movies (love me some 28 Days Later), a few short stories, and zombies have made cameos in the urban fantasy I read. But a book FOCUSED on zombies? Nope. And I know they're out there. World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks are books we own that my husband has read but I haven't (yet). I'm also aware of Mark Henry's Happy Hour of the Damned, which I don't have because despite fantastic reviews, I'm very suspicious of it. That may change.
The point is, I'm not expert, but I'm no zombie virgin either. You can thank the movies for that.
I really like the world-building, though I'll say up front that Ryan raises so many more questions than she answers. That's kind of okay, because I'm aware there's going to be sequels/companion novels, and the writing is strong enough that I'm willing to keep reading to learn more. But essentially, what we see and what's implied, I like. And I really like how this isn't a story of the START of a zombie apocalypse, but rather the life that lingers after.
Admittedly, the whole enclosed village brought to mind the movie The Village (which I sort of liked, even though it's one of Shyamalan's weaker films), but in a good way. I kept expecting there to be a twist, and there sort of is, considering the Sisterhood and even the Guardians know more than they're sharing with the village. But we really just scratch the tip of those truths: we know there's more to life in the village and how the Unconsecrated came to be and the world at large, but the story itself focuses on Mary.
Mary's an interesting character in that she's completely selfish, and in the end, she's kind of rewarded for it.
Think about it: thanks to the stories her mother told her, she's obsessed with the ocean. So much so that once she gets confirmation that there's a WORLD beyond their village, possibly beyond the Forest, then that's all she can think about. That's her goal. To see that the stories her mother told her were truth, to restore her faith (not in God, but the ocean). And in the end, she makes it there. It's a rather disturbing scene as she awakes after washing up on shore and narrowly misses getting decapitated, but in all actuality, that's a great scene, showing THE MAN (who has no name), decapitating the Unconsecrated so that they can't rise again. So, with the ocean, Mary gets her wish.
But her other wish is Travis, the young man she's fallen deeply, hopelessly, and impossibly in love with, even though he belongs to her best friend and his older brother, Harry, is hopelessly in love with her.
Here's the thing that kind of bugs me: save for her brother (for obvious reasons), the guys in this story are completely in love with Mary. It's all about her, which reinforces her selfishness and enables her to make bad choices. I'm all about bad choices, but it felt too easy that as she fell hopelessly for Travis, that he returned her passion. I use the term passion loosely, because I was shocked at the lack of actual contact in the book. Oh, I don't mind a slow burn and the few kisses, but honestly, when it's just her and Travis living in that house in the OTHER village, I was surprised that neither of them interacted enough to give into the temptation of sex. Sex DOES happen in YA, contrary to some people's opinions, and contrary to some other people's opinions, THAT'S OKAY.
It didn't happen here, and we learn by the end it's because in the end, Travis was never enough for her. Her true goal was the ocean, even though she spent a good deal of the book moaning about Travis, mooning over Travis, and so on and so forth.
The point is that by Travis returning her feelings, her selfishness is reinforced, and that's frustrating. A character should grow over the course of the book, and when I realized how selfish and self-centered Mary was, I was looking forward to seeing her put in her place, like having Travis truly be in love with Cass and rebuking Mary's advances. If not that, then something else that she coveted not working out the way she wanted. To me, the ocean was far more important than Travis, so Travis should've been the disappointment. I didn't mind him sacrificing himself to help the group get out of the village, but it was a show of heroism for her, you know? Anyway, it's bad enough the character's name is Mary. We don't want her to be a Mary Sue in regards to love interests.
Those are really my only complaints about the book (though I had some trouble with descriptive passages, especially when Mary's in the tunnel for the second time). I liked the pace of it, and I liked putting together the puzzle pieces of how the world really worked and why Gabrielle was so different and why on Earth the Sisterhood sacrificed her the way they did. I really liked Ryan's portrayal of a strict religious society. It's such a hard thing to pull off simply because it's too easy to fall into the extreme melodrama, but Ryan toes a pretty solid line. I find the Sisterhood and the society that's created believable, especially as we learn there's more to the human world than just this village.
And truly, Mary is a compelling character in spite of her selfishness. I just wanted her to earn her ending a little more, and I don't think she did. In later books, I hope we learn more about what happened to her companions, and I'd like to see their story away from her so they can start building their own lives somehow, even though that's going to be near impossible.
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to future books. It's a very solid debut.
My Rating
Must Have: it would've gone to the Keeper Shelf, especially at the beginning, but I ended up having some issues with the narrator, who certainly works to make you like her, especially by the end. But there's no doubt that for a story that's essentially about zombies, this is compelling, elegant, haunting, and fascinating. This is the first book in a series, which is a good thing, because Ryan raises all kinds of questions she doesn't answer that I look forward to getting in the future. The atmosphere is excellent, and while Ryan never truly names what part of the country this takes place in (all you've got is the actual forest and the quest for the ocean), I had no trouble picturing this in Appalachia, which would make sense since that's where the author resides. :) The writing of this book is very, very solid and I can't wait to see this author grow technically and creatively. Certainly, the book's not without it's flaws, as we've got a rather selfish narrator and quite a few unanswered questions, but the journey is so worth it, and the promise of more just makes it better. I can't recommend this book enough, and this isn't the type of story that non-YA readers should shy away from. It earns your respect in spite of its flaws, and it's definitely worth the time and I daresay money if you're like me and purchase your books. And that's saying something, as it's in hardcover (and Kindle, but I don't have one of those).
Cover Commentary: Love it, love it, love it. The background coloring is perfect, the profile of the girl with the wind wafting through her hair just makes a wonderfully haunting image. This is one of those books that you can judge a book by the cover, and again, it's so worth it.
Next up:
Storm Glass by Maria V. Snyder