mindless flesh-hunger
trapped in forests by metal fences
crueler to live with hope


Okay, so I didn't actually keep to my intended haiku pattern of 5/7/5 syllables each. If you want better haiku check out Scifaiku top ten for 1996. (especially: The stars look lovely/through/these borrowed eyes.)

However, my haiku pretty much sums up my reading of Carrie Ryan's Forest of Hands and Teeth .

Mary is a girl who lives in a small town (reminiscent of the movie The Village here) surrounded by fences. Flesh-mad zombies live in the forest all around and are constantly at this fence clawing at it to get the living people they scent inside.

She doesn't want to become a nun or marry the villager chosen for her. So she tries a fenced in path leading away from the village, despite not knowing where it leads to, on the day her village is destroyed and overrun by the zombies.

So basically the story, kind of heavy-handedly in my opinion, focuses on doing your duty versus doing what you love, and the cruelty of having to kill loved ones (as those loved ones turn into flesh-eating zombies and try to eat you) as well as having faith in the unknown. (mary bases her desire to try out the path on stories her mother told her about the ocean before everyone in the outside world became zombies.)

The secondary characters never really came alive for me, nor did the relationship between Mary and her loved one, Travis, after the first few chapters. So subsequent tragic events didn't seem so tragic to me. There was too much gray area for me about whether Mary was at fault for accepting he assigned guy, and waffling from Travis who would instantly react to her nearness with panting breath and desire but when the slightest thing reminded him she was promised to another he would totally diss her and go away.

I also, while enjoying the exploration of a world where people had to fear zombies overruning their village any moment, felt the scenes trapped in the fenced in path kind of went on too long, and there was no emotional pay off for me for the secondary characters at the end. Mary leaves them and finds the ocean at the end all alone, and so we never quite know how the emotional journey and fates of the others end up. Kind of unsatisfying after hanging out with them and watching them lose their innocence and naivety when their village was destroyed by zombies!

So while this was enjoyable for me, it didn't quite press all those emotional trigger buttons for me as much as I would like. However not-quite-emotionally-deep this novel came off for me, the cool world factor and the glimmerings of interesting character development apparent in the novel would prompt me to read subsequent novels by this author.

zombies and star-crossed love
can mary outrun cruel fate?
salt waves not the answer