I read Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth, not because of a compelling desire to jump on the zombie train that seems to be going around these days (though that did help), but because of this:
So there is talk of the agony of finding out someone you love is infected and will become a zombie, and how naturally you are desperate to be with them just one more day and fall into desperate denial and cannot contemplate hurting them.
So someone Mary loves gets infected. (I will not say if it is one of the two boys in her love triangle, her brother, her cousin, or the orphan boy they adopt. You will have to read it and see!)
MARY: … HAND ME THAT SHOVEL.
Mary lives in a fenced-in village several generations after the zombie apocalypse. The village is protected by fences, which keep the lumbering hordes of zombies on one side and idiot hordes of villagers on the other; by the Guardians, who in any other context would be described as zombies themselves for all the good they do anyone; and by the Sisters, who are the evil nuns running the show. Mary is not a typical heroine, partly because the only talk of flowing dark locks involves the kind she smashes through, and partly because she is sensible and rational and no one is surprised by it, except readers used to sexist portrayals of women.
#Recommended.
