I checked out The Forest of Hands and Teeth from the Library, which had perked my interest despite it being a book for young adults. It had zombies, and a female protagonist.
I was greatly disappointed by the latter. Let’s break it up into the romance plots, and the hero plots.
So Mary is in love with childhood friend Travis, but at the beginning of the novel his brother Harry, who is also her childhood friend, asks for her hand. Then later he renigs on the offer and she gets stuck in the nunnery for a while. So she’s crushed that the boy she didn’t want never followed through, and still pining after Travis, who is engaged to her other childhood friend Cass.
Later Travis is laid up in the church healing from a broken leg, and she whispers stories into his ear and feel like their love is blossoming even though he’s promised to someone else. He gets better and goes back to Cass, but not before Cass admits to Mary and in Travis’s absence, she’s fallen in love with Harry, who by the way is finally forcing Mary to wed him. But the ladies decide to let things remain as they are because apparently nobody wants to tell Harry he can’t have what HE wants, so three other hearts have to be hurt in the process.
Travis and Mary briefly decide to screw it all and cancel their other wedding plans, but he never follows through. Later he says it was for her own good because he loved her so damn much and wanted her to have a safe and happy life with Harry. WHATEVER.
So Mary and Harry and Cass and Travis all go through a handfasting ceremony, then the zombies break through the village defenses and they all end up wandering through this gated labyrinth through the forest. They find another abandoned village, but in the chaos Travis and Mary get stuck in one house, while Harry and Cass are in a fortified tree house. You’d think Mary would be dead pleased with this situation, because even though Travis never came for her she forgives him and doesn’t actually bring the subject up for months, but after a while she starts to hate Travis too, and avoids him, which breaks his heart. Later he boldly offers to endanger himself to help the group, but he gets bitten and she has to decapitate him.
This was the same problem I had with the Twilight protagonist: everybody loves her, and she’s too good for any of them. Cass eventually finds an orphan boy to put all her love into and says she no longer cares about Harry, which frees up both brothers to dote on Mary. Mary flip flops over the both of them and treats them both like dirt while at the same time acting like she deserves something from them. Ick. This is not healthy love triangle (if such a thing even exists), it’s one spoiled girl scorning two men who are both crazy about her despite the fact that neither of them can keep their promises. The fact repeated again and again is that neither of them would fulfill her completely, because she craves freedom and going her own way, out of the village and through the forest and hopefully finding the ocean her mother had always told her about. But she is so needy and whiny about these two guys I kinda wish she’d nut up and actually walk away from them, rather than bemoaning the fact that she always feels so trapped.
On to the actual zombie plot and Mary’s heroic quest. Mary thinks she’s independent, or wants to be independent, and is constantly taking risks and going out on her own and damn the rest of them she’s idealistic and free! But she always survives about 5 minutes before facing near death, and each time she actually considers giving up and allowing herself to be torn to bits by zombies, before someone else comes in and saves her ass. And EVERYONE saves her; Travis, Harry, her brother Jed, the nuns, even the dog. They all jump in at one point and come to her rescue because she couldn’t actually survive on her own. And Travis, Jed, and the nun die because of it! They willingly sacrifice themselves for her because they love her so damn much.
You’d think she’d come out at the end of her hero quest a stronger person, not willing to depend on others or resenting them for not loving her the way she wants to be loved. You’d think she would do something heroic and come out okay, without having to be saved by someone else. But no. After tumbling down a waterfall, giving up and figuring she’ll drown, she gets washed out to her precious ocean and meets a kindly man by the beach. Oh good, another man to protect her and martyr himself for her! And just so you don’t think I’m reading too much into this, here’s the last sentence of this whole trainwreck:
For a while I stand and watch, until the beach is clear and then man takes my hand and leads me to the lighthouse.
She doesn’t boldly stride into the new village, she isn’t setting out on her own now that she’s lost everyone. She’s once again allowing herself to be cared for by another guy. And she’ll probably resent him for it and try to run off again and he’ll come out to save her from the zombies and die and she’ll feel bad before finding someone else to do the same thing again. And again. And again. Her hero’s cycle just spins and spins and she never breaks free of it and becomes something better than a needy, impetuous, short-sighted child.
The stuff about the zombies was good, though.
bed linen then! bed clothes- perfectly acceptable irish phrase
