why did it have to be zombies?

[jazzfish]

Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth

I picked this up at the local Borders Everything Must Go sale, on the grounds that it's got a great title and I remembered someone saying good things about it. (Turns out that was tam_nonlinear, who likes this sort of thing.)

"Oh," I said, three pages in, "a zombie book. I hate zombie books."

This one starts out as my kind of zombie book, though. Conspiracies and secrets and history, plus plenty of teen angst.

If it'd stuck with that I would have been happy... but the zombies attack about a third of the way through, and for the rest of the book the small band of survivors have to make their way through the eponymous Forest. When your characters are fighting and running for their very lives there's not much opportunity to reveal deep worldbuilding secrets.

As zombie books go, it's a good one. There's a genuinely horrifying scene involving an infected infant, and some great tension. But by the end I was just plain worn out. Much like the characters. If I were the target audience for this book, I'd probably like it a great deal. As it stands I may read the sequels for the worldbuilding, but I can't see myself rereading this one at all.

Comments

[tam_nonlinear]

Actually, I found the zombies to be the least irritating part of the book- I liked it, and I'd lend you the sequel if you're interested, but I was fairly irritated with the main character through much of the story. There is someone trying to eat your brains, right now, and you're wondering if the boy you like really likes you or maybe he really likes someone else and- hello, the walking dead are calling for your blood, how about a little perspective? The second book isn't nearly as bad as that, and does more world-building, but these are absolutely in the light entertainment genre, if books with flesh-eating undead can be called such.

I like post-apocalyptic fiction in general, mostly because I tend to be fascinated by how people survive and normalize to strange, new conditions.

[thanate]

I read an interview with the author a couple months before it came out, in which she was talking about how it's a post-post-apocalyptic book: the apocalypse has come and gone, and while in a lot of post apocalyptic things there's still some tie to the way it all was before (or at least people around who remember it) she wanted to build a world where this is all anyone really remembers. My archaeo-historical brain got all excited about that, and expected something like Martha Wells' City of Bones.

I was horribly disappointed to read it and find out it was a loose-ends-dangling horror aesthetic novel that got interrupted by zombies every time something interesting looked like it was about to happen.

[faekitty.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on zombie books!The only one I have read that I like is The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore.