The Dead-Tossed Waves (The Forest of Hands and Teeth #2) by Carrie Ryan

BookTalk

Gabry is standing at the line between childhood and the world of adults, the line of innocence and knowledge, the line of life and death. Gabry is standing at the wall that separates her seaside town from the land of the Unconsecrated. One bite from an infected means death either instantaneous or slowly after days and days. Gabry is a smart and cautious girl…there is no way she’d ever jump this wall.

But then there’s a boy…

A boy she wants to kiss…

A boy who is right now holding down a hand…beckoning her beyond the wall…

While that first kiss is magical, it opens up Pandora’s Box. This decision to jump the wall will unleash knowledge Gabry never wanted to have. She’ll lose friends, she’ll lose her home, and she’ll lose the boy she thinks she loves.

But another boy will appear…and one from her past will come back, scarred and changed. Gabry will have to find the fight that hides inside her. Gabry will have to learn to face her fears. Because once the wall is breached, there is no turning back.

Review

I’ll admit I was a little thrown at the start of this book. Mary’s story just didn’t seem finished to me at the end of the first book (The Forest of Hands and Teeth). We left her standing at the edge of the ocean…searching for meaning in all that she’d been striving for the whole book. When this book started, about 20 years in the future. I was a little out of whack

“Where did my story go?” “Why am I reading about whiny teens?” “Why the hell are they leaving the safety of the city?!” “Is nothing dangerous anymore?!”

It took me awhile to warm up to Gabry. I liked that Mary’s story was continued by her daughter. That I had a sense of Mary’s life, the one she chose to lead after finding the ocean. I understood the choice…as I understand choices Mary makes later in the book. But really the focus shifts to the daughter Gabrielle, Gabry for short. I didn’t love how she was so nervous for the first half of this. I felt that her indecision, for the most part, did actually lead to other character’s falls. She’s missing the survival instinct that Mary and her generation had.

The more I think about this lack of instinct the more I realized that it was simply Ryan correctly imagining her characters. Time has passed. Survivors have created systems, governments, and jobs to keep their people safer. The Unconsecrated are better controlled for the most part. Gabry didn’t grow up like Mary. Gabry was missing the genesis for Mary’s spunk and smarts.

Don’t worry…Gabry gets her own kick in the butt zombie style. It’s not too long before she too is making hard decisions and fighting off herds of Unconsecrated. Often times in the name of love. Yep, this one has a love triangle too. At one point Ryan wavered around the area of repetition from the first book, but then does a bait and switch mixing up our love trajectory.

As with the first, this second book in the series kept me rapt at attention. I couldn’t put it down! At the end I’m always amazed at how well she plays it all. How a YA zombie book becomes something oh, so much more.

Rating: 4/5 Mary’s daughter can hold her own

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