For Christmas, I got the Barnes & Noble Nook. It is awesome. The first book I completed on it was The Forest and Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. I heard about this book a couple of years ago, but based on the age group of my students, I never picked it up, because I knew I wouldn't be able to recommend it to 5th and 6th graders. Now that I have 7th and 8th graders, I am able to select more and more YA novels, and I'm so glad!
The Forest of Hands and Teeth is my first foray into the zombie genre, and I enjoyed it. Mary lives in a village in the middle of a forest of Unconsecrated, undead humans infected and hungering for blood. The press against the fences that surround Mary's village unrelentingly. Mary has already lost her father to the Forest of Hands and Teeth, but he will not be the only loved one Mary loses.
What's interesting about this story is that the reader knows just about as much as Mary does about the Return and the world outside of Mary's village, not a whole lot. So when Mary enters the Sisterhood, I was thinking she would be uncovering some deep, dirty secrets of the sisters. Instead, there is a breach, the village is wiped out, and Mary, along with her closest loved ones (how much did she luck out?) flee the village and enter the "forbidden" path. The reader begins to hope that this path is going to lead to the group's salvation, but, well, you'll just have to read it to figure out whether Mary ever makes it to her precious ocean or not.
Themes: hope, faith, and zombies
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