Ok, raise your hand if you saw The Village.
Now raise your hand if you liked The Village.
Now raise your hand if you like books that follow the same plot line as M. Night Shyamalan movies.
That’s what I thought.
The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan, has all the makings of a really captivating story. A girl living in a village surrounded by a forest where zombies live. She needs to find out if there is anyone else alive in the world outside her town. It sounds pretty sweet. Post-apocolyptic. Zombies. Not to mention the reviews on the back said it was sexy. But even with all this going for it I was still weary. Because I saw The Village once. I did not see The Village Twice. There is a reason for that. And the fact that The Village came out in 2004 and this book was published in 2009 is more than a little suspicious.
But I was having a hard time finding something to read so when I saw it at the library I grabbed it.
I was pleasantly surprised.
The story starts out with a town that is very old-fashioned, you know, arranged marriages, doing your own laundry in a babbling brook, no cell-phone service type of old-fashioned. The main character, Mary, is approached by another character, Henry who asks her to marry him. But, what’s this? Mary is in love with Henry’s brother, Travis. But, sacre bleu! Travis has already asked Mary’s best friend, Cass, to marry him. So what does Mary do?
She watches her mother get infected by zombie disease, has her brother kick her out of the house, and becomes a nun. (by the way, don’t google image “zombie nun.” It’s not as fun as it sounds.)
This is where things get cool. The town is basically run by these nuns and boy do they mean business.
But not this type of business. More like, we’re going to keep everyone trapped in this town through a combination of fear and religious devotion kind of business. I’m also pretty sure the nuns in this book don’t wear Teevas.
So it becomes pretty clear pretty soon that the nuns know more about this zombie situation than they’re letting on, and that they want to keep everyone here for a reason. Which, yes, is exactly like The Village, but for some reason I was more intrigued by this because of the strong religious overtones. 
Atheist.
So, as Mary is discovering that the Sisterhood is corrupt, Travis hurts his leg and is being treated in a room close to Mary’s. She visits him often and some sexy encounters occur and we soon realize that Travis is totally into her! AHHHHHH!!!! But wait. He’s still engaged to Cass.
But that problem is solved as well! Because while Cass is fretting about Travis’ injury, Henry is comforting her and she totally falls for him!
AHHHHHHHHH!!!!
But wait. Henry is still in love with Mary. But you know what? When three out of the four people being married are upset with the situation, and changing around the pairing just a little will make three out of the four people very happy, then doesn’t it make sense to….
Apparently not, because they all decide to go along with the marriages they had already planned. Because I guess Henry’s feelings matter more than everyone else’s. Maybe he throws really intense tantrums or something.
“IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH!!!!”
So Mary marries Henry so that she can escape from the corrupt Sisterhood, but I’m thinking, ok, there’s definitely gonna be some more info about these nuns ‘cause they’re messed up, man. This could make for a really interesting story of politics, with the zombies as a backdrop, rather than literally the only plot device.
But no. According to Carrie Ryan, the zombie plot device trumps all. The night of the double wedding that could have very easily been a happy day for most, but because Carrie Ryan wanted to make her characters unfulfilled, and the only way that she could think to do that was by putting them in a very fixable situation, most of them were miserable, something awful happens. SPOILER ALERT: The zombies break into the village and kill EVERYONE. Like literally EVERYONE. The only survivors are Henry, Cass, Mary, Travis, Mary’s brother and his wife, a small boy named Jacob, and a dog.
Now, this is awful for a couple of reasons. I mean, first of all, their entire town was totally destroyed. That’s pretty bad for the characters. But looking at this from the perspective of someone who knows that this is a book that was written by an author who has total control over what happens in it, that was literally the worst plot twist I’ve ever seen. You had a good thing going, Carrie Ryan! You were creating intrigue! But now that intrigue is gone because not only did you kill off the characters creating it, you demolished the entire village, leaving the subject moot.
This happens pretty early on in the book too, and let me tell you, the rest of the book sucks.
Carrie Ryan got all the good stuff out of the way early; things like dystopian society, crazy nuns, even all the sexy scenes were when Travis was injured. The rest of the book is devoted to the survivors making they’re way through the Forest of Hands and Teeth, protected by a fence that is set up along a path. That is literally ALL THAT HAPPENS. Sure, they find another town, but oh, guess what? Carrie Ryan can’t get over her zombie fetish so that town has also been destroyed by the undead.
LEAVE US SOMETHING TO WORK WITH, CARRIE!
So, I really couldn’t stand this book. It lost me as soon as everyone interesting was killed and we were left with the boring losers who couldn’t figure out how to get married.
There are also two sequels to The Forest of Hands and Teeth, but I don’t think that they have the same characters because SPOILER ALERT: everyone except for Mary dies at the end.
...Yeah, this book is awful.
Photo Cred:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthracite
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