***WARNING***
This review is very spoiler heavy. The
ending is talked about. I tried to review the book without spoilers
but I just couldn’t get my emotions across as I wanted to.
I would recommend only reading this review if
you have already read the book.
***WARNING***
---
I first came across this title about a year ago
when a blogger that I was following at the time read it for Hallowe’en and
rated it as one of their favourite books of the year. It got put on a back
burner of “maybe I’ll look into that one day” until my GoodReads group,
Basically Books, considered it for their monthly read (it got degraded to buddy
read, but no matter). So I found a copy of it for a fiver and figured I’d give
it a go. It’s got all those shining reviews, right? There has to be something good
about it… The fact that Twilight, Blue Bloods, Graceling, etc., all also have
hundreds of shining reviews seems to have escaped me.
From just reading the synopsis, I thought it
sounded rather like the literary version of M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The
Village, except with zombies that invade the village instead of weird scary demon
creatures. I figured I couldn’t go wrong.
Presentation: I have the British paperback
version. It’s an average-sized YA book with relatively large font that is well
spaced. There are 309 pages broken down into 36 chapters so the chapters aren’t
particularly long.
Story: Mary has lived her whole life in
her isolated village in the middle of the Forest of Hands and Teeth. They tell
her that there is nothing beyond the village, only Unconsecrated (zombies) that
hunger for human flesh. But her mother has always told her stories of life
before the Unconsecrated, of a wide expanse of water where all you can see is
more water – the ocean – and Mary clings to the hope that there has to be more
out there than just her village.
When Mary’s
mother is bitten, doomed to become an Unconsecrated herself, she chooses life
as a zombie over death as a human. Mary’s brother, Jed, blames her for allowing
their mother to make that choice and casts her out of the house. She is taken
in by the Sisterhood – followers of God who run the village – where she is to
become one of the Sisters as no one has asked for the right to marry her. She
discovers that the Sisterhood has been keeping secrets, secrets that doom the
village.
***Repeat WARNING***
This is your last chance to turn back. Spoilers
ahead.
***Repeat WARNING***
Thoughts
and impressions: Everything
started out fine, if a little slow. There’s quite a bit of background
information given in the first half of the book. You get to know Mary a bit.
You’re presented with her world, her village and their customs, and some of the
history. You meet the requisite love triangle – brothers Harry (who wants Mary)
and Travis (whom Mary wants) – and the best friend, Cass. You see the Cathedral
and the Sisterhood from the inside. You overhear whispered conversations that
hint that there’s more to their world than they’re letting on. You find out
that those paths the Sisters always said never lead anywhere must actually lead
somewhere because a girl came down them. You discover that the Sisters must
have fed this girl to the Unconsecrated because the next time she is seen, she’s
on the other side of the fence and she’s moving fast – she’s not a normal
zombie, she’s a speedy zombie.
But why is
she speedy? you ask. That answer is not given. What has the Sisterhood to do
with the Unconsecrated? you ask. You’re never told. What’s with the Bible in
the locked room with scribblings in the margins? you want to know. That is
something that you will have to keep wondering.
I don’t
mind when a book does not answer all of the questions put forward. Really, I
don’t. But some of the questions ought to be answered. I know why we don’t get
the answers here – Mary doesn’t know them herself and after the Sisters
sacrifice Gabrielle (the outsider) to the zombies and then get everyone in the
village killed, it becomes evident that that could well be information that has
died with the Sisterhood. The story then
becomes a quest for survival. It could easily have taken a different, and in my
opinion more interesting, route and become a quest for answers – but the pull
of the ocean is too strong. Every story should answer at least some of the
major questions it poses, but in this case I get the feeling that it’s all just
going to be relegated to sequels – at least I hope the sequels answer these
questions! Not that I’ll be reading them.
So Mary
finds herself in the fenced off paths with six other survivors of the village
massacre, with no idea where they’re going or if they’ll survive. Mary becomes
absolutely obsessed with Gabrielle (who follows them, bashing into the fence
and trying to reach them, until she ‘burns herself out’) and the clue she left
scratched into the window pane in the Cathedral – “Gabrielle XIV” (I think it
was XIV, I could be wrong). So they wander around this maze with no clue where
they’re going, frequently hitting dead ends and having to turn back and slowly
running out of food and water. Mary gets annoyed with Harry for wanting to
marry her when she wanted to marry Travis and he’s expressed reciprocal
feelings; she gets mad at Travis for not coming to save her from marriage to
Harry when he’d said he would; she gets mad at her brother for bringing along
his infected wife and eventually coldly announces to everyone as a (very) low
blow to her brother in a fight that Beth is, indeed, infected and Jed will have
to behead his wife, Harry and Travis their sister. Then she wanders off on her
own, feeling a little guilty but not at all ashamed of her actions and
eventually makes her way back there with the information that the paths are marked
by weird letters in a pattern she doesn’t understand. This is followed by more
of Mary getting annoyed with Harry, the party coming close to starvation, and
then Mary becoming even more one-track-minded when they discover a fence that
reads “XIV” and she equates it to Gabrielle’s origins. She leads them all into
a village full of zombies without thinking and they get separated – Mary and
Travis end up in a house together, the other 4 ended up in a treetop “village”.
Everybody has food and water, all is good.
But it’s
not because Mary can’t be happy with anything! She’s in a house, safe, with the
boy she claims to love and who loves her too. What does she do? She avoids him
and spends her time staring at the other four in their treetop safe haven! She
becomes obsessed with being remembered and not forgotten. Her old fascination
for stories of the ocean rears its ugly head again (now that she no longer has
Gabrielle to be obsessed with) and she takes out all her fears and frustrations
of the one she supposedly loves but doesn’t want to spend time with.
Eventually
things go wrong, as they inevitably would, and the zombies get into the house.
So while Travis is fashioning an escape route for them, what does Mary do? She
looks at photos of the world before the Unconsecrated, reads a book of poems
and tries to distract Travis while he tries desperately to save her life. To
make things worse, this is the second time she’s been a useless lump of lard in
such a situation! During the attack on the village, Harry is busy ransacking
their cottage for anything that may help them survive. What does Mary do? She
lies in bed then gets up and puts her skirt and blouse on. Seriously?
Seriously?! Mary could not survive on her own and it’s only because of the
blind love these two men feel towards her (of which she is not worthy) that she’s
even made it this far.
So Travis
sends her across to the others then follows himself, but is attacked by Unconsecrated
and for a moment it’s a bit touch and go as to whether or not he’ll make it.
Then he comes and speaks with Mary and she pretty much tells him that he’s not
enough for her, that she wants the ocean. Bitch. As if a few waves could ever
make up for being loved and cared for. The ocean won’t protect you, it won’t
make sure you get away from a zombie attack – in fact, if Gabrielle’s story is
to be believed, it’s more likely to dump a bunch of zombies on you than protect
you from them. And yet she still walks away from him.
Cue big
fire forcing them to try to escape back to the fenced off paths. Travis,
already wounded from a nasty break to his leg at the start of the story and
then the zombie attack on the house just recently, takes a rope, leaps down and
tries to make it to the paths so he can secure the rope and provide them with a
means of getting across to the corridor without having to wade through zombies.
He manages to secure the rope, but being already wounded, the Unconsecrated do
enough damage to turn him. Too little, too late, Mary realises that he would
have been enough but he’s still dead - well, undead until she slams a scythe
into his neck - he still gave his life for her. This is where I admit that I
cried at this point. I know that really there’s not all that much to Travis’s
character – he stays quite shallow throughout the story but I view this as
being in part because Mary does not allow him to become deeper. We don’t know
why she loves him, we don’t know why he loves her – but this is written from
the first person perspective and thus everything is only shown as Mary sees it,
and Mary only chooses to see how Travis cares for her. Despite him being
shallow, I liked him. By this time I did not like Mary.
She doesn’t
do anything to redeem herself. In fact, in her blind obsession she manages to get
Jed killed as well. Or we at least are led to assume he’s dead. He falls into a
river full of zombies, but then so does she and she survives. His corpse is
never found and I was half-hoping that he would just randomly reappear in the
sequel, having miraculously survived his trip down the river. Then I discovered
that the sequel is about Mary’s daughter Gabry (and the obsession with
Gabrielle lives on!) so I lost all hope of that ever happening. The remaining 3
companions are just left in the forest - Lord knows what happens to them. But
Mary gets to go and float in the sea, to taste the salt, to see the
never-ending expanse of water – even if the beach is full of recently
decapitated zombies. So Mary gets her happy ending. She doesn’t deserve it! She’s
a selfish child who has got everyone who ever cared about her killed throughout
the course of the novel. She deserved to die as well. She did not deserve to fulfil
her dream of reaching the ocean.
Let me
point out at this point that I have nothing against novels with bittersweet
endings. The Book Thief – I cried, I hated the author for what he did (even
though he announced that he was going to do it right at the very beginning of
the novel) but I loved the story and recommend it to everyone. The High Lord? I
cried, I hated the author for what she did, but I loved the story and still
snap up everything she writes. The Saga of Darren Shan? I cried, I hated the
author for what he did, but I still loved the saga as a whole. But this one? I
hated the author for what she did and it brought me to the point of hating the
book as well. In all the other cases, the characters had gone through such
trials, so many ups and downs. Yes, they’d made mistakes at times, but they
were presented as being so very human in so many ways that I knew the deaths
weren’t their fault but caused by outside influences – be those bombs, fights
against the enemy or whatever else. In this case, the deaths were caused by
Mary’s one track mind and her obsession with getting to the ocean. She was a
horrible, horrible character.
It is very
rare that I get so worked up about a book that I disliked like this. It is very
rare that I ever feel hatred towards a fictional character – I mean, they’re
fictional, they’re not worth it. But in this case? I can’t help myself. It is
stronger than I am.
Style: Fairly basic. Written in the
present tense. Not essentially bad but not good. Frequently boring.
Final verdict: In another author’s capable hands,
this story could have been so good. If it had taken a slightly route here, a different
plot idea there, it could have been one of the better YA horror stories out
there. As it is, I was intrigued by the first half, made wary by the third
quarter and appalled by the ending. I wish I could unread it. 1 star.
Extra notes: No swearing (I think – if there is
it didn’t stand out), no sex.
