Fantasy Week! I
normally like reading fantasy. Diana
Gabaldon’s Outlander series and
Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games
trilogy are some of my favorite books! Yes.
I even liked the Twilight series. The movies
ruined those books…they’re a joke now.
Indeed, they sound like they’d be ridiculous, and they’re not great
literature by any stretch of the imagination.
What they did offer was a fun read over which I could then bond with my
students. But I digress… Unfortunately,
The Forest of Hands and Teeth is the
first book that I’ve blogged on for this class that I really just didn’t like
all that much. It wasn’t terrible, and
it had a few pretty good moments, but it just didn’t grab me.
The plot follows our protagonist Mary as she deals with life
in her oppressive post-apocalyptic society, surrounded by fences that are the
only barrier between the village’s inhabitants and “The Unconsecrated” in “The
Forest of Hands and Teeth” beyond. Like
every teenager, she feels trapped literally and figuratively. She yearns to discover what lies outside her
village and to see the ocean that her mother had visited when she was a
girl…before “The Return.” Mary is
betrothed to a boy named Harry but she’s in love with his brother Travis who’s
betrothed to Mary’s best friend the beautiful Cass who’s in love with
Harry. Got that? Yeah.
It’s high school drama wrapped up in dystopian fantasy. Every girl’s dream! Her father was among the first to be infected
when the virus first hit, and she knows he is somewhere in the forest behind
the fence.
Mary’s mother, in one of the few exciting moments in the
novel, eventually becomes infected (after having possibly located her infected
husband by searching from her side of the fence day in and day out) and is sent
off to “live” (be undead searching for brains?) in the forest. This inciting incident sets off a series of
events that unfortunately just sort of spin around for a while. The plot never really reaches a climax. Mary ends up living in the Sisterhood and
being generally defiant for a while but, at some point, the fence surrounding
the village is compromised and “The Unconsecrated” (zombies) attack! Mary and her band of merry friends set off
into the forest protected by fences hoping to get her to her dream
destination…the ocean. In their
travels, they find another village like theirs, and then zombies attack there, too. Lots of people die...well…become undead, and
it just gets out of control. If you do
choose to read this book along with its prequels and sequels, I won’t tell you
the end. Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend
that you do read it.
The novel is loaded with Biblical allusions that are,
unfortunately, never explained. For
example, the protagonist’s name is Mary as an obvious reference to the Virgin
Mary, and the dystopian village she and the other characters live in following
a virus epidemic (“The Return”) is controlled by a “Sisterhood” of women who
live in what seems to be similar to a medieval convent and the “Guardians” who
patrol the border between the village and the dangerous forest beyond. They have an ancient text full of secrets to
which only the Sisterhood has access, but we never really learn anything about
this book. Additionally, the virus
causes people to become zombies, only they’re not called zombies; they’re “The
Unconsecrated.” (On a side note: why is it that zombies never
seem to be called zombies anymore? On The Walking Dead, they’re
“Walkers.” In this book, they’re “The
Unconsecrated.”)
I chose The Forest of
Hands and Teeth because it was one of the selections for the faculty book
club at school this year. I thought
surely our Media Center ladies wouldn’t have chosen a bad one! Well, they didn’t really like it all that
much either. Perhaps if the plot had followed
a more understandable arc and if some of the minor characters that were
introduced then thrown away had actually served to progress the plot, it may
have been palatable. My biggest problem,
however, was the lack of explanation of the allusions. I understand that, as a reader, I need to be
able to make the connections on my own, but no information was provided at all. Throw me a bone, here! While The Forest of Hands and Teeth certainly fits the genre of Modern Fantasy (it deals with the supernatural and the author is able to create a setting and characters that are believable to the point that I was able to empathize with their plight and envision their reality), it just was not a great read. Because of these reasons, I’d probably use
this book as an example in class of how NOT to write a book. I might ask my students how they might rewrite
some of the passages to make them more interesting or coherent.
BIG QUESTION: The
character of Gabrielle seems to be pivotal to Mary’s motivation to explore the
world outside of her village in The
Forest of Hands and Teeth, but the reader doesn’t get enough information to
understand why Mary is so fascinated by her.
What details would you add to Gabrielle’s characterization to make her
come alive for the reader? How would you
help the reader to empathize with Mary’s interest in her?
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