The book started out great. It was everything I never knew I wanted in a zombie story. A girl living in a village, generations after a huge zombie plague. Her village is so isolated that she's never been out of it and neither has anyone else. Her mother tells her stories of the ocean, tall buildings and cities with thousands of people, but no one else believes the stories are true.

There's tragedy of course and that is how she ends up living with the sisterhood. The sisterhood controls everyone and everything in the village. They bless the weddings and keep track of the families to make sure no cases of consanguinuity occur (you know, first cousins marrying, they have a population problem, hardly any babies are born, probably because the population is too small to keep breeding together safely).

While living in the grim Sisterhood compound she finds out a secret. One that is never fully explained in the book.

Now, if the secret wasn't such a big deal I would just move on from it and enjoy the book anyway, but it really bugged me that there wasn't a good explanation!

Add to that the annoying romance. Over and over the author tells us that Anna loves Travis. Okaaay, then show us why. Travis had a chance to ask for her and he didn't, but his brother did and Harry, who isn't perhaps as cute as Travis has been a little more up front and honest with her. I kept hoping Anna would forget about Travis, but she didn't. I mean he made promises to her and didn't keep them and she just accepted it. She jumped into a crowd of zombies to save him!

Now, onward with the rest of the story.

Anna wanders off. She does this a lot in the book. I can't tell you about the ending, because it would ruin the book for you. Suffice it to say, I was a bit let down. There are dangling stories, what happened to Cass, Jed and Harry?

I really wanted to LOVE this book. It was entertaining, I liked it. There certainly were no dull parts!

This book starts out interesting. The world of the book unfolds relatively quickly, pulling the reader along. Once I realized this would be a dystopian novel, I was excited; I love dystopias.

About a third of the way into the book, it became clear that the protagonist's detached, flat tone was probably not a stylistic choice, but rather a lack of character development. The book is very plot/event driven, and doesn't have any real characters. I found it hard to believe that the protagonist had two men in love with her; she didn't seem real, or to have any particularly redeeming qualities.

In fact, my biggest problem with the book was the protagonist's philosophies. She's determined to reach the ocean, even at the cost of her own life -- certainly at the cost of the lives of many of her loved ones. She continually ponders if she's "selfish," and other characters call her selfish as well. But she always decides that she can't give up her "dream." She's convinced there is other life beyond the zombie-infested forest, and she's determined to find it, even if it means sacrificing her family and other loved ones.

This book tries hard to set up the classic dichotomy of choice vs. unquestioned belief, and fails. There is nothing profound about this book. The protagonist even waffles about the man she claims to be utterly in love with -- they go from the "honeymoon stage" to feeling trapped and bored in no time at all.

The plot's also not the greatest either. How's this for a plot hole: The mysterious Sisterhood that controls the village insists that the village is the only one left in the entire world -- there is nobody living in or beyond the Forest except for the zombies. People in the village accept this, and to insist that there are other humans living elsewhere is considered utter nonsense. However! When the girl in the bright red vest arrives seemingly unscathed through the Forest, the Sisters keep her a secret from the villagers. They lock her away and only turn her loose when she becomes a zombie. She turns out to be a spectacular zombie, zipping around in the bright red vest with a speed and ferocity that the other zombies don't have. Nobody else has a bright red vest either.

AND YET, once all the villagers see this new zombie, who wears clothing unlike any found in their village and who is CLEARLY not anybody they've ever seen in their village, they don't question the Sisterhood's party line of "we are the only ones left; there is nobody else." That doesn't make any sense!

Also, the protagonist finds a book that says the Sisterhood _made_ the red vest girl zombie super-strong and super-ferocious by isolating her for a while. This is never explored. I wish it had been; it would have been a lot more interesting than listening to the harebrained protagonist go on about how she should have a choice in how to live her life. How much choice can there be when you're constantly on alert for zombie attacks?

In fact, the protagonist is kind of a dope. An irredeemable dope. Most of the people in her village are just happy to live another day without being devoured by zombies, but this nitwit is so sure there's something more to life. She drags her friends and what's left of her family through the Forest, in search of a better life, and, because they're all dopes too, they risk their lives to follow her.

She does attain her "dream" at the end, of seeing the ocean, but how valuable can that be? She's still stuck on a zombie-infested planet, except now she has a waterfront view.

This book carries overtones of Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend," Lois Lowry's "The Giver," and even a tiny hint of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" -- all books that are infinitely better than this one. Read those and give this one a miss.

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I may be the only female on the planet who has not bought into the latest book to take Amazon and Barnes by storm. You know the series I'm talking about... Dark covers, a dark and brooding beautiful guy with fangs and the muy bella girl he loves and can't live without. It just isn't my swoony cup of tea, much to the chagrin of many of my friends and probably every woman I see step on the subway with hardcover in hand. I have received much flak, grief and guff for my opinions but have recently stepped back into the good graces of a few with Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth .

Meet Mary, a heroine who is as firmly planted in her reality as she is in her dreams. She longs to escape the confines of her village, one that for as long as she remembers has been fenced in, cut off from the rest of the world...if there still is one. On the other side lies the Forest of Hands and Teeth and the Unconsecrated, a zombie-like people who are as undead as vampires but who somehow haunted me more with their hollowed-out faces and continuous crashing against the fences looking for prey. Despite Mary's obligations to her family, her people and her own survival she longs for something bigger. She knows she must marry to keep the bloodlines going but she dreams of escaping to the beach, a faraway entity she has only heard of in her mother's stories. Think The Village meets The Handmaid's Tale with just a smidge of Twilight (the undead factor) and you get a sense of this book.

Unlike, Stephenie Meyer's klutzy faux heroine (no hate mail please), I found Mary to be a well-developed, great "teenage" character dealing with the adult in a very young adult mindframe. The plot itself is fantasy pure and simple (and though young love always seems to be based in the fantasy) the driving emotions behind the story are steeped in the reality of the fantasy world, taking into account complexities, obligation, family and devotion rather than hyperbolic "tunnel-vision" solely for the sake of turning pages. This could just be the next great series and though I am not typically a fantasy reader of much of a Young Adult reader for that matter, I'll happily jump on board that bandwagon.