The Forest of Hands & Teeth by Carrie Ryan

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You can get my latest book, The Frog Prince’s Daughters, for only $1 until mid-August. After that, it still costs less than $4. And it’s DRM-free. Check it out.
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We’ve had 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later; this is like 28 Decades Later. Mary lives in a village behind fences. Beyond the fences are the Unconsecrated and the endless forest. Inside the fences, her choices are limited: marry and raise a family – society needs more children – or join the Sisterhood, women who dedicate their lives to serving God and protecting the villagers from the scourge outside. There’s also Guardians, who maintain the fences and fight back against breaches of the perimeter.

Mary has been infected – but not by the Unconsecrated. Her mother told her tales passed down from her great-great-great grandmother, especially stories of the ocean. Her gaze is focused on the world outside those fences, a world which just might contain other survivors or an ocean safe from zombies (which term, by the way, is never used in the book). When she is forced into the Sisterhood, she begins to learn more than she suspected about the secrets the Sisterhood and Guardians keep, and when the breach comes, she is thrust into hard choices between duty and love, safety and following your dreams.

I loved this book. It’s very simply told and under-stated but powerful for that. The nature of the story (it’s first person) means that there are things Mary does not know and cannot know, which then means that quite a lot is left under-explained, but that works (I tend to prefer under-explanation to over-explanation, particularly when it would have to be strong-armed into the plot somehow).

The characters have their conflicting motivations, which makes them sometimes noble and sometimes cruel – including Mary, who is just as flawed as the rest of them, if not more so, as her obsession for the ocean grows the worse their situation gets. I was unconvinced on Travis, the love interest, who came across as weak and unworthy, but there’s a reason for that, eventually.

There’s nods to the zombie horror movie genre, or horror/disaster movies in general, as when they conveniently acquire a dog and a small child just before we move into true horror-movie territory. But despite the zombie setting, it’s really a story of the choices we make and why we make them. Bleak and hopeful and restrained in its language, it reminded me, particularly the first part, of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au, Australia’s biggest online bookstore. All their book prices are guaranteed better than Amazon and they do free delivery for orders over $50.