There’s a sequel coming out next year (well, sequel of sorts) and I’m curious to see what answers it will present. It didn’t feel like it was lazy, it just felt unfinished, which, while frustrating, also felt like it matched the tone of the storyline and the world that had no easy answers. This book has so so many themes going on (not in a heavy-handed way it’s just a complex book), including religion, family and marriage, love versus commitment, and then various puzzles about the Sisterhood and a very fast zombie and the Guardians (the people who protect the village, killing Unconsecrated), but almost none of them are resolved.
Without spoiling it anymore, just be prepared for there to be an unbelievable amount of death. I haven’t read any zombie books before (because, ew, yuck), and I was simply not prepared for the fact that there would be so much death. Somehow this dream has become the overwhelming goal of Mary’s life and she will be forced to see how much she is willing to sacrifice for this dream. Mary’s mother has told her stories about the ocean (apparently her great-great-great-grandmother visited it) and Mary dreams of seeing it – a place untouched by the Unconsecrated, a world without a fence around it. The Return began generations ago – people in the village have no memory of life before it, nothing with which to compare the way they live. The Sisterhood is the religious group that oversees the village, insisting that this tiny set of people is all the remains of the human race since the Return (when people started coming back to life as Unconsecrated). All around the fence are the Unconsecrated (code name for zombies), so you can’t go too near the fence of you’ll get bitten, become infected, and then you’ll have two choices: be killed or let yourself die and then return as a zombie (obviously, you get chucked outside the fence). Mary has grown up in a small village surrounded by a fence.
the forest of hands and teeth by carrie ryan Liking The Hunger Games is not an automatic guarantee that you’ll like The Forest of Hands and Teeth. I had heard a lot of comparisons to The Hunger Games, with good reason – a strong female character, death galore, a post-apocalyptic world – but while I’ve assured dozens of people that, despite being about kids killing each other on television, it’s not that dark or depressing, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is quite depressing. I still don’t really know what to make of the book. 7 of 10: Gorgeously written, but fairly depressing.
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