Carrie Ryan

It's a generation after [b:The Forest of Hands and Teeth|3432478|The Forest of Hands and Teeth (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, #1)|Carrie Ryan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320633297s/3432478.jpg|3473471], and Mary's daughter Gabry is now a teenager herself. Mary was frustratingly focused on her own romantic entanglements in the last book--but somehow, Gabry is so.much.worse. Every single chapter, she manages to make an even stupider decision based on absolutely nothing but her desire show more for some random dude. Not only is she incapable of complex thought, but she's continually freezing in fear or stumbling and falling. For example: Her True Love is dying of a zombie bite beyond the fence. Gabry risks her life to visit him one last time. She freezes up when she sees the zombies, then falls down and is only saved by some hot stranger. She leaves him behind and visits her True Love. Although she knows he's dying, she refuses to kill him, even though that would prevent him from rising as a zombie. Then she asks the hot stranger to help her return in a few days so she can visit him *again*. Apparently enthralled by her (for what? her impressive combat skills, courage, or smarts?), Hot Stranger agrees. So a few days later, Gabry once again climbs over the fence, once again freezes and falls over when confronted by a zombie, and is once again saved by the Hot Stranger. And the worst part is? She does all this even though she's supposed to be at the beach right then, clubbing zombies. She's literally the town's only defense against the zombies washing up from the ocean, and she chooses to go wandering in the woods (TWICE) at the exact time of day that they wash up, without warning anyone or thinking that perhaps she should choose a different time to go mooning at her True Love. And what a surprise, her absence means the town is overrun with zombies. SO DUMB OMG OMG. Repeat this kind of dumb, cowardly, selfish decision making over and over. By the end, I just wanted Gabry dead.

I was excited by the series concept and the first few chapters of the first book--Ryan certainly knows how to write horror--but the characters are just too awful to read. I think I'll skip the third one. At the rate Ryan's heroines are going, the third girl will just lie down and cry the first time she sees a zombie. show less

In this final (please god) installment of the series, the narrator is Anna, the twin sister of Gabrielle. Anna grew up following Elias around after they left Gabrielle in the forest alone and injured. Tortured by guilt over this betrayal, Anna and Elias devote themselves to survival, eventually ending up in the post apocalyptic ruins of New York.

The ruined city is controlled by the recruiters who work to keep the city locked down and relatively free of plague rats (zombies). At some point show more Anna is severely injured by falling into a pit of razor wire. She carries the scars all over her body and lives with a deep sense of brokenness. Elias has always worked hard to take care of her until one day he kisses her and the next day he signs up for the recruiters and leaves her behind. Anna believes he left because she is too ugly to love and waits in the city for many years for his eventual return. But he doesn't return, even long after his tour of duty would be over.

Finally, Anna decides to leave the city herself. She remembers fondly the woodland village she grew up in and figures she'll head back that way and see if she can find her long lost sister. As luck would have it, she almost literally bumps into her sister while she's crossing the bridge. Gabrielle is crossing the bridge into the city with Catcher, who is infected but immune. The guards won't let him in and try to kill him so Gabrielle causes a scene so he can escape. This gets her taken into custody by the recruiters who say they are taking her to "the Sanctuary".

It is at this time that the horde of zombies that have been chasing Gabrielle and Catcher from the last book descend upon the city. The place is overrun and chaos breaks out. While she is running for her life, Anna bumps into Catcher who rescues her and explains about how he knows her sister. Their plan is to escape the zombies together and then find and rescue Gabrielle.

Later still, they meet up with Elias who barely speaks to Anna but instead is super focused on rescuing Gabrielle. He is still a recruiter so he says they should be able to just get into the Sanctuary and find her. Almost immediately upon reaching the Sanctuary it is revealed that Elias has been working for the recruiters all this time and promised to bring them Catcher in exchange for a safe place for himself and the twins. But it is also immediately clear that the Sanctuary is not safe and now they have to escape from it. The rest of the book is about these four fuckwits trying to escape from the trap they walked into.

WOW, this book is terrible, toxic, and just the literal worst thing I've ever read. The book's central theme and main character is rape. Literally every interaction Anna has with a man eventually devolves into him either physically assaulting her, sexually assaulting her, or him deciding out loud that she is too ugly to rape. Every time.

Elias is maybe the worst person ever. His great plan to protect Anna first involves him abandoning her for several years in a city where food is scarce and women are constantly being attacked. Then, his bright idea is to take her to the Sanctuary, or as I like to call it, Rape Island. It's an island completely populated by the recruiters, a band of military men known far and wide for their brutality. The book mentions several times that their are no more women on the island (I can only assume they were all raped to death) and so the men are very... interested in women. The fetishization of violence against women is disturbing enough in this book. But honestly, it's more disturbing the way rape is at no point mentioned.The author tip toes around it with implication or gross euphemisms like "forced breeding". GAG.

The first thing that Anna is told when she arrives at the Sanctuary is not to provoke the recruiters. Their leader tells Anna that all his men know he will side with them no matter what. He tells her to stay out of their way and basically don't fight back when they try to rape you. Anna's like, "Yo, Elias, I don't think it's safe here." He immediately gaslights her and preemptively victim blames her for "getting into trouble".

She is immediately beaten up in the mess hall for rejecting the sexual advances of a recruiter. Her face is covered in bruises and Elias again is like, "Don't worry, I'll protect you. But also, stay out of trouble." JESUS CHRIST. This type of literature should not be given to young women who will grow up thinking that no one will ever believe them especially those who supposedly love them the most.

Two more times Anna only narrowly escapes from death as the recruiters lock her and her sister outside during a blizzard on a desolate beach covered in zombies. I still don't really understand how they survived. When they make it back inside the Sanctuary, we are told that Elias believed they were both dead. And yet, he immediately is like, "Don't worry, I'll protect you." BRO. YOU ALREADY DIDN'T PROTECT THEM. Every man in this book is gross and toxic. They are either rapists or gaslighters. Throw this whole series in the trash. It's disgusting.

Of course, all the usual critiques of this series apply. The book is unforgivably boring. The internal monologue of the narrator is tedious, repetitive, and just stupid. Anna is simultaneously supposed to be a jaded, survivor who has seen it all and closed herself off from all human affection but is also horny as hell and getting all wet over Catcher while they are literally fleeing from a zombie horde. The stakes are so low. You know from the beginning that they will all escape and be fine in the end. Meanwhile, all the obstacles to their safety are just transparent plot devices meant to pad out the book's page count.

But truly, the whole rape thing is just too much. It was extremely offensively handled and damaging. The literal climax of the book is the leader of the recruiters demanding that Catcher "give his men one of the women". Once again, rape is not mentioned. Just extremely heavily implied. The author seems to want to have it both ways. In reality, the world in which this story takes place is a world where Anna would have been raped countless times. Sexual violence is so much a part of the culture of this city and the recruiters that it would have been inescapable, especially after Elias abandoned her and she lived alone for years.

Yet the book also wants to paint Anna as some virginal waif who simultaneously, "knows how to survive." The book paints her as a gritty fighter who is used to the casual brutality of her world. But she massively isn't! She carries around a big knife but almost never uses it except by accident or in a bluffing way that is always called. She's never killed anyone, and actually lays a massive guilt trip on Catcher for killing a recruiter who literally had her locked in a cage with a zombie. She called him a murderer for killing the man who was killing her. I.... What?

In the most brutal scene in the whole book, Anna refuses to mercy kill an extremely sick and dying woman who is about to be transformed into a zombie. The woman begs her through the bars of her cage to end her suffering and then destroy the zombie she becomes. This woman had been kind to Anna and they had shared a lot while they were both imprisoned. Anna just locks her in the cage and leaves her to die alone. WTF?

Everyone in this book sucks and I hate the author personally for the sick and twisted narrative about rape and violence against women that she's created. It's unforgivable. show less

In a post zombie-apocalypse world, an isolated village lives a quasi-Medieval lifestyle bounded by a disciplined militaristic group of "Guardians" and a religious order of "Sisters". The Guardians maintain the fences which keep out the "unconsecrated" (read: zombies) and the Sisters dictate policy related to social life. In this village lives Mary, a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. She has dreams of the ocean and is curious about the world outside the fences. But escalating incursions show more by the Unconsecrated will soon turn her insular world upside down.

So here is the book’s central conflict: Mary is in love with Travis, her childhood friend. But Travis loves Cass, Mary’s best friend. Harry, Travis’s brother, loves Mary. Mary has been trying to get Travis to notice her, but he is apparently indifferent. Mary is super jealous of Cass, but reminds herself that her society doesn't really care about love in marriage. Marriage is about commitment and maintaining the bloodlines and insuring the continuation of the living.

And this is the root of this book’s bewildering dual personality. On the one hand, we are led to believe this is one of those classic survival theocracies that spring up after a total social collapse. The narrator herself tells us over and over again that love is not important or valued and the Sisters basically decide who marries who. But, at the same time, all the characters in the book are obsessed with love in a tremendously over-the-top high school rom-com type way. Meanwhile, there are literal zombies clawing at the fences surrounding the village, filling the night air with their plaintive moans and people are literally being torn to shreds every day.

The narrator is almost constantly terrified for her life or the lives of her friends. Their tiny village is under siege and has been for decades. There’s no clear end in sight. But she’ll jump from musing about her mother’s slow and tragic transformation into a shambling nightmare to whining about how her best (and only) friend doesn’t deserve the love of Travis. Why doesn’t Travis love her?!?

One minute she’ll be wondering where the order of the Sisters came from and why they keep all these mysterious secrets from the rest of the village, and in the next she’ll be making out with Travis and dreaming of having babies with him. She wants to see what’s beyond the fences, but she also totally wants to be a super basic housewife. The neck-snapping tonal shifts in this book are really hard to reconcile.

I mean, I get it. Authors want to cash in on the post-apocalyptic trend in YA and get their own movie deals. I get that they just want to write a standard teen romance with a light veneer of SciFi. I get it! But the author can't even get the teen drama right! Her characters are so flat and under developed that the reader can't root for anyone. Harry, Travis, Mary and Cass are all basically interchangeable. We don't know why Mary is in love with Travis. We don't know why Travis doesn't return these feelings. We don't know why Cass and Harry feel the way they do. But this flimsy love-quadrangle almost immediately collapses anyway. Mary spends five minutes alone with Travis when he's injured and they start making out. For no reason. While he's engaged to Cass. While Mary is a proto-nun.

Later, we learn that Cass doesn't love Travis, either. She loves Harry. But... I guess Harry loves Mary? And Cass insists that Mary accept Harry so that his heart isn't broken? But, Harry doesn't love Mary. He totally took back his courtship after Mary's mother died - for no clear reason, and his motives are never explained. It seems like, these four kids could just pair off sensibly and literally no one would care. I know I don't care one way or the other. What's the conflict? But the author keeps injecting illogical conflict. Once Travis and Mary are in love, Harry inexplicably un-take-backs his rejection and now they have to get married. Travis promises to break up their betrothal and then inexplicably doesn't. And whichever way the wind blows, Mary is ready to make her peace with it. She's supposedly so in love with Travis that they are transcendentally connected at the soul bone, but she still accepts Harry's non-consensual proposal. And they make out a bunch. But, the make outs with Harry are not as good as the Travis make outs. But, I guess, she's a pawn of fate or whatever and if she has to get married because Travis lied to her and never came to break up the engagement (his reason for not coming is never explained) she'll just have to get married to his brother. Shrug.

Also, this town is apparently composed entirely of six teenage couples and one old creepy nun. Even when Mary joins the Sisters she literally is never introduced to anyone except the creepy old nun. There are apparently lots of other people, but they are only referenced in large, faceless groups. Sure there are zombies everywhere, and (one imagines) this small village is in a constant battle with the elements to scratch out a living, but we literally never feel this tension. Mary doesn’t appear to have any agrarian responsibilities. She doesn’t do chores like gardening, feeding chickens, making clothes or really anything. School isn’t even mentioned. Apparently, her entire life has just been loafing around wondering if Travis will ever notice her. Geez, life sure is easy in the post-apocalyptic future! Even when she joins the Sisters - an order that apparently is integral to society and manages the food supply and bosses everyone around she has literally no duties. Creepy old nun is like, "Go pray, I guess?" Even in the present day nuns have jobs to do! At the very least, chores! What is this world?

Of course, this book suffers from all the usual problems: non-existent character development; chronic refusal to show and dogged insistence upon telling us everything; extremely vague and derivative world-building; disrespectfully glaring plot holes, boring and unappealing main characters; tedious and repetitive internal monologues. Seriously, even the book's flaws are unoriginal.

And, OMG, don't miss the riveting climax of the novel where we watch five teenagers try to figure out how to read Roman numerals. These teens are so minutely removed from civilization that they all know how to read. There is a (probably) Catholic church. There are "scriptures" - although it is not explicitly stated that they are the Judeo-Christian Bible, it is heavily implied. It was just jarring that none of them had encountered Roman numerals before. Look, I guess that it's not all that unlikely that even modern teenagers don't know how to read Roman numerals. But, sheesh, don't you want to make your heroes a little bit smart? I'm sorry, but they all just sound like boneheads as they read out loud, again and again, "Ex... vee... eye... eye... dur, what can it mean?? It's like the letters are trying to tell me something, but WHAT???"

Oh man, whew. This book is just awful, terrible, trash. show less

I have never read a more hauntingly poetic horror story than this novel. I think zombies are interesting from a symbolic standpoint, but I have never been adamantly on Team Zombie. I'm not a super blood and guts horror girl. The good news is that you don't have to be in order to enjoy this book.
Ryan's descriptions and the social structure of the village are very similar (in my mind) to M. Night Shamalan's The Village. Ryan has developed a complex society that the reader can see arose show more directly out of the rise of zombies, but she also respects her readers enough to not spell things out for us. She sketches the outlines and lets us fill in the blanks. I think this would usually bother me, but Ryan's prose is so beautiful that it doesn't bother me at all. Here, let me show you the first paragraph:

My mother used to tell me about the ocean. She said there was a place where there was nothing but water as far as you could see, and that it was always moving, rushing toward you and then away. She once showed me a picture that she said was my great-great-great-grandmother standing in the ocean as a child. It had been years since, and the picture was lost to fire long ago, but I remember it, faded and worn. A little girl surrounded by nothingness.

The entire book is just as beautiful and flowing. Usually I can't handle things that are excessively sad (and come on, it's a majorly distopian zombie novel, it's going to be sad), but Mary's ability to focus on beauty was inspiring as well.

I think the boost best and worst element of the book was Mary's hope. Mary hopes to a point that I would describe as selfish at times. In my opinion it makes her a little difficult to like, but it also makes her so rich and real to me. That element is kind of like how I view the last scene of Moulin Rouge!-- I dislike it on its own, but it enriches the whole so beautifully that I can't imagine the work without it.

Rating: 5 stars-- I have no idea why I waited this long to read this series, and I will definitely be reading the sequels soon! show less