The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

In Mary's world, there are simple truths.

The Sisterhood always knows best.

The Guardians will protect and serve.

The Unconsecrated will never relent.

And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village. The fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

But slowly, Mary's truths are failing her. She's learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.

Now she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and
Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

I've been having a really hard time figuring out what to say about this book. There's been an awful lot of excitement going on about it (including my own), and I hesitate to say it, but...it didn't really work for me.

The trouble is that I really enjoyed Ryan's writing. I've seen it described as "lyrical", and I certainly can't argue with that. I found the plot fairly gripping, especially once they left the village and broke out on their own.

The characters -- and Mary in particular -- are where it failed me, though. And...I'm going to have to back up here and admit that it was pretty obvious from about the halfway point that this book wasn't going to do it for me, and I spent a lot of time when I wasn't reading trying to figure out why, and what I was going to say about it. And I decided that the problem was that I was the wrong audience for this book -- that it was a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, and as a reader I didn't have the patience for it. I kept wanting Mary to roll up her sleeves, take up the lemons that had been given to her, and make the best darn lemonade in her power. I kept waiting for her to grow up and start dealing with things like an adult, and I didn't want to wait until the events of the story shaped her into that adult. I figured I could chalk it up to "the wrong book for me, and the wrong reader for the book".

But...I finished the book, and realized that I was wrong. It's not a coming-of-age story. Mary doesn't grow up. She's no wiser or smarter or more reasoned than she was at the start of the book. She makes the same selfish, foolhardy, impassioned, irrational decisions all the way through the book, and for the most part she never really has to sit down and face the fact that that's a really stupid thing to do in the best of times, and even more so in the kind of dire, fight-for-survival, life-or-death situations that she finds herself in.

And, the more I think about it, the more I remember other coming-of-age stories that I did enjoy. A Companion To Wolves comes first to my mind as a story about a boy growing into a man that never once left me sitting there grinding my teeth wishing the main character would stop acting so darned childish. But also Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart, which tops the list of my favorite books of all time. Phedre spends a lot of time in that book being thoughtlessly privileged and capricious and self-absorbed, but it never irked me the way that this did.

I also hard time connecting emotionally with Mary, for a number of reasons. Mary does a lot of navel-gazing during the book, and that sort of constant introspection made me impatient to get on with the action. And a large part of her thoughts throughout the book revolve around her feelings for a certain boy. Now, I absolutely love a good love story, and it doesn't take a lot to make me throw myself behind the main romance in a book and cheer for it for all I'm worth. But it does take more than telling the main character telling me she loves somebody, and then never showing me why. There's no substance to it, it's not built on anything more than Mary's say-so, and in the beginning I was content to take it at face value and wait for all to be revealed in the course of the novel, but that never really happened. And I had a very hard time getting behind Mary's feelings for this boy when they caused her to do things like stop and contemplate the color of his eyes while their house and only shelter is being invaded by the Unconsecrated.

Which, I suppose, is all a long-winded way of saying that I enjoyed the writing and the story, but the character whose eyes we saw it all through ruined it for me.