Book Review #7

Sara still reads. Very randomly, and very unreliably, but she does.

Today it shall be:

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

As always, it will be subjected to the rigorous 5 Steps of Doom: Summary, What I Liked, What I Didn't Like, The Overall Mood Said Book Left Me In, and The Overall Rating. The Overall Rating will be based on the highly selective Sara's Scale of Suck or Soar, as follows, lowest to highest:

Level 1: This is How Not to Write a Book
Level 2: What Editor Read this and said "Hmm, Let's Publish it"?
Level 3: My Faith in Writers is Wavering Precariously
Level 4: This Doesn't Suck
Level 5: I'd Read the Sequel
And the coveted Level 6: Fan-FREAKING-tastic. Buy at All Costs.

Summary: Girl lives in extremely uptight psycho-religious village in the middle of zombie-infected forest. Girl wants to leave psycho-religious village (don't we all?) and gets chance to leave when fences are breached. Girl, brother, brother's wife, girl's friend, girl's love interest, girl's ex-almost-husband (yep, love interest/husband are two different people) escape, run through fenced-in paths, running from zombies. Blood, limbs, broken fingers, moaning, fire, houses in trees, rope, ocean, trees, moans, trees, blood, a dog. And more trees.

What I Liked: The end. Everything from page 198 on rocks. We get answers to things (not everything), we get insight into why certain things happened, we get character development, we get action/adventure/heartbreak/excitement. I just so happened to stop reading last night at page 197, so when I picked it up today and it rocked from then on, I was pleasantly surprised. And, also, it's a zombie book, so Carrie Ryan gets major kudos for writing a zombie book. I can't name even one other book I could compare this to, so brava, lady. You score big for uniqueness.

What I Didn't Like: Pages 1-197. Mary, the MC, has a horrible tendency to repeat herself: "I could see the river where Harry held my hand." Two pages later: "The river where Harry held my hand was--" Two paragraphs later: "The river where Harry held my hand wound around the--" A page later: "On top of the tower, I could see the river where Harry held my hand." Okay, move on now.

The love interest is unbelievable until page 198 on (and not the good "unbelievable"). Travis (love interest) has a handful of lines, and Mary's "love" of him is based on him being unconscious/sick in a bed for most of their interactions. He proclaims to love her too, but never explains why he loves her, what motivates him, or why he did/didn't do anything for her until well into the end. Which for me was far, far too long of a delay. I didn't know anything about this dude until page 221 -- until then, he was this trait-less anybody who could've been the biggest jerk in recorded novel history or the greatest guy in recorded novel history. After page 221, I totally loved him. Only wish I could've totally loved him from the minute Mary did. All of the characters, actually, were lacking in development; Mary mentions her relationship with them through flashbacks, but I would've much rather SEEN who they were to her. I felt like I had been dumped into the middle of their stories instead of experienced everything with them.

The Overall Mood Said Book Left Me In: Metaphoric. How can one feel metaphoric? Well, the more I think about this book and how it ended and what all happened, the more I feel that it wasn't supposed to be a story as much as a metaphor for life. We have to move through our proverbial "forest of hands and teeth," knowing that if we stray too far either way, zombies (death) will claim us. We are trapped in a lot of what we do by fear of death so we stay on the path. There are some of us that move with purpose, moving ever closer to that mystical "ocean" in the distance. But the ocean, in terms of metaphors, can stand for any number of things -- whatever someone most desires, really. When we get out of our forest alive and realize what we had to sacrifice to reach our "ocean," it can sometimes pale in comparison to what we lost.

So there's my philosophical word of the day.

The Overall Rating: In terms of "deeper meaning," this book was really good. In terms of the business side of writing, it fell flat in character development. So I hereby dub this book as a Level 4: This Doesn't Suck. Though its "deeper meaning" was impressive, the characters just weren't gripping enough to bring me into a sequel.

Oh, and remember to check out my early Project Perk. It's a funny one :)