The Forest of Hands and Teeth

title: The Forest of Hands and Teeth
author: Carrie Ryan
how I read it: ePub from the public library

Mary’s village sits alone and isolated, the last pocket of civilization in a sea of trees and horror. Mary’s life is one of constraints; she is bound both by the chain-link fence that encloses her small village and by the strict social rules that govern every aspect of her existence. Her life’s soundtrack consists of the moaning and rattling that surround her village and the Sisters’ lectures about what is expected of her.

I chose this book because the title intrigued me. I didn’t know what to expect when I began reading. The first thing that struck me was the author’s use of capitalization to show me What Was Important: the Forest, the Return, the Guardians, the Unconsecrated, the Sisters. To be honest, this stylistic choice struck me as a little bit clumsy and I almost put the book down. Then I realized that the Unconsecrated were zombies.

Yes, zombies.

So obviously I kept reading.

The concept behind this book is absolutely fascinating. This isn’t a story about surviving the chaos and terror of a zombie apocalypse. It isn’t about characters coming to terms with people dying and coming back to eat them. It isn’t about bands of humans turning on one another in a sea of shuffling, hungry, mindless, tireless creatures. (Oh, how I love zombie stories...)

Instead, this is a story about what happens after the world has ended. Over a century after the Return, people are used to the moaning undead scrabbling at the chain link fence, breaking their fingers and teeth trying to get through. That the dead return to eat the living has become a normal, everyday part of life. Mary, the main character, feels suffocated by the constraints put in place by religious leaders to protect, increase and ultimately control the small population of survivors who believe that they are the only humans left.

While the concept continues to intrigue me, I must admit that I didn’t feel much for the characters. Mary seemed somehow flat and unrelatable. She was not the contradictory, passionate, flawed, strong heroine that I tend to prefer in young adult novels. Instead, she was a bit dull and single-minded. She wanted what she wanted – whether what she wanted was a boy or the ocean – and she was willing to sacrifice anything to get it. I found her behaviour to be selfish and her passion not believable enough to excuse her selfishness:

“I promised him that I wouldn’t accept safe and calm. Not at the expense of my dreams.”

Nope, sorry. I’m just not buying it.

One of the main things that I look for in young adult fiction is character growth. At its heart, young adult literature is about growing up, changing, learning more about oneself and the world. Unfortunately, the Mary that we met on the first page of this novel was the same Mary that we found on the last one. The other characters in the book – Harry, Travis, Cass – were no more three-dimensional than Mary. The obligatory love triangle fell flat for me; I honestly didn’t care about the romantic conflicts at all. To be honest, the richest character was Argos, the puppy. I worried a lot about him during the zombie attacks.

I don’t mean to judge this book too harshly. Carrie Ryan’s debut novel was – as I’ve already said – based on an exciting and original idea. It was suspenseful and dark, as zombie stories should be. There were some unresolved mysteries in the story that left me wondering – that might be a negative for some, but it’s a positive for me. I prefer that books not end in a tidy package tied up with a bow.

The world was interesting enough to keep me reading and Ryan stayed true to the grim post-apocalyptic atmosphere that she set in the beginning. Had the author put more of an emphasis on character development and less on zombie attacks, I think that this could have been a very good book. I will definitely read more of her books, although I hope that her future work has stronger, more developed characters.

this books made me want to: learn how to shoot a bow and arrow

verdict: The Forest of Hands and Teeth is worth reading if you like zombies as much as I do, but don’t expect it to be life-changing. It won’t linger in your mind long after you’ve read it.

sequels: The Dead-Tossed Waves, The Dark and Hollow Places