Book Review: _In the Forest of Hands and Teeth_ by Carrie Ryan

I borrowed this book from Seanan, who handed it to me with a comment that it was more my sort of thing than hers. This was a rather curious comment, since it's a zombie novel and I'm not a horror kind of girl, but I think she was probably right.

Please don't get me wrong, I liked this book. It's just... a bit problematic in ways that make me want to poke at the holes to see if I can make a pattern out of them.

Forthwith, the cover text. After that, all is spoilers.

In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village—the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.

When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?

SPOILERS AHOY (This is a newish book, which is why I'm making a Thing about it.)

This is such a promising concept, and very YA-genre appropriate -- our Young Heroine discovers that what she's been taught is perhaps not quite the truth, plus zombies. The writing is marvelously atmospheric, with our Village of (possibly) lone survivors, surrounded at all times by a seething mass of zombies, protected only by chain-link fences and platforms in the trees they can retreat to if the fences are breached.

The book opens with Mary's mother succumbing to madness after losing her husband and going too close to the fences, where she is bitten by an Unconsecrated (zombie). (Please don't ask how you can bite someone through a chain-link fence, we're just not going to go there.) It turns out that the Village has an odd custom where if you are infected, you can choose to be put out into the Forest of Hands and Teeth instead of being decapitated after you die. The Village even has a set-up to deal with this eventuality -- a pen they let you die and Return in, with a gate that can be lifted from outside by a rope. Mary's mother chooses this, and Mary spends some time trying to find her mother in the mass of zombies around the village.

I liked this part of the book -- the poignancy of knowing that her mother chose death and zombiehood on the slim hope of hanging on to enough of her identity to find Mary's father and reunite with him resonates well.

Her brother, blaming her for not being there to keep her mother away from the fence (and then for letting her choose to become Unconsecrated rather than be killed), turns her away, at which point she is taken in by the Sisterhood, the religious order that runs the Village. This is where the real problems with the book start. There's very little background given about how or why the Sisterhood came to run the Village, complete with iron-bound ritual and secret tunnels. This makes the world feel a little hollow, especially when they're shown to be fanatics who will turn people over to the Unconsecrated (or at least threaten to) rather than allow questioning of their doctrine. The Cathedral where the Sisterhood lives is described in fairly close detail, and little tid-bits of the rites and rituals are nicely inserted into the ongoing conversations and events.

The real problem is that there's no background -- somehow this structure feels precarious (perhaps because of the rigidity with which it's enforced), but we're also meant to feel a great weight of ages to all of this. I know it's a first-person narrative, and those always tend to have unreliable narrators and big chunks in the available knowledge, but I think the focus isn't quite tight enough, in some odd way, to justify the complete information vacuum. Even when we're given scraps and pieces of information, it's only ever just enough to tantalize rather than really inform.

It's not really the "around the corner" problem (where it feels like if you went around the corner from the main character, there would only be an unformed void), but it's a similar kind of thing, I think.

The book continues through the inevitable steps of the Hero's Journey -- the destruction of "home," the need to set out on a voyage, the currently en-vogue love triangle (although no sex or anything even close to sex, really), und so weiter. It's all very nicely done, the characters feel more-or-less fully realized, the atmosphere stays tense (even if the story does lag at points). The book is very dark, though. I'm not sure I would give it to a younger teenager -- it's pretty bloody, violent in places (as zombie novels tend to be), and has themes of parental death, miscarriage, and some really nasty politics. It didn't quite give me nightmares, but I could see it doing so for someone with less experience with creepiness.

Really, my big problem with this book is the timing of the whole thing -- inside the Village, it feels like things have been the way they are for generation upon generation. Mary's mother tells her stories about the semi-mythical ocean, and proves its existence with a picture of her many-times-great-grandmother at the seaside. The books Mary finds hidden in the Cathedral that reveal that the Sisterhood are experimenting on the relationship between people and Unconsecrated are crumbling and old.

And yet, when Mary and the remnants of her Village (conveniently made up of the person she's been betrothed to, his brother who she's in love with, her best friend who's betrothed to the brother but loves Mary's intended instead, and Mary's brother and his wife, who turns out to be infected and has to be beheaded a few days into their journey) find another Village at the end of a series of paths made of chain link and gates, there are photos and newspapers that can still be read and carried around without crumbling away into dust. Newspaper simply doesn't last that long, and there are other clues that could be put together to imply a Return with Mary's parents' lifetimes (or even within Mary's, really -- that oh-so-convenient unspecified event that wiped out much of her generation in infancy could have been the Return, especially with the ongoing presence of Unconsecrated infants that feels sort of Thematically Important).

Other things that could really use explanation are how all of this elaborate anti-zombie infrastructure got built, if the virus (and it's explicitly stated to be a virus) swept over the entire world that quickly? It's not just one big stone building, but the Village and its anti-zombie platforms, the chain-link fence that encircles the whole thing (and how do they repair it after breaches??), and a network of paths that lead from one outpost Village to another (or at least, it's strongly implied that there are more than just the two that we see on-screen).

The book also ends rather abruptly. The object of the quest is reached, and it turns out that if the people who lived by the seaside had only had as much faith in their myths as Mary did in hers, everyone left would have survived, instead of being left on the endless chain-link paths that have dead-ends all over the place. (And why do those dead ends exist? Were there structures there once? If you were building a huge anti-zombie set of paths through your all-encompassing forest, would you put dead ends in it?)

All of that being said, I'm not sorry I read it. Mary's voice is strong and consistent, and the world is very interesting (if it were less so, I'd be less frustrated at the lack of information!). This book could easily have been half-again as long without really doing it any damage, unless you want to make the argument that the ignorance is part of the atmosphere. It's a supportable argument, really, but I just wound up feeling like I'd been left with bookus interruptus.

I borrowed this, and will probably not be hunting a copy for myself, although I would buy a second-hand one if it were priced reasonably. I recommend this book for people who enjoy atmosphere and character interaction and don't find it necessary to poke at the whys and wherefores of a world too much.