The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

In Mary’s world, there are simple truths.

The Sisterhood always knows best.

The Guardians will protect and serve.

The Unconsecrated will never relent.

And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village. The fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

But slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power. And, when the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.

Now she must choose between her village and her future, between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and
Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded by so much death?

I’ve been having a really hard time figuring out what to say about this book. There’s been an awful lot of excitement going on about it (including my own), and I hesitate to say it, but…it didn’t really work for me.

The trouble is that I really enjoyed Ryan’s writing. I’ve seen it described as “lyrical”, and I certainly can’t argue with that. I found the plot fairly gripping, especially once they left the village and broke out on their own.

The characters — and Mary in particular — are where it failed me, though. And…I’m going to have to back up here and admit that it was pretty obvious from about the halfway point that this book wasn’t going to do it for me, and I spent a lot of time when I wasn’t reading trying to figure out why, and what I was going to say about it. And I decided that the problem was that I was the wrong audience for this book — that it was a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, and as a reader I didn’t have the patience for it. I kept wanting Mary to roll up her sleeves, take up the lemons that had been given to her, and make the best darn lemonade in her power. I kept waiting for her to grow up and start dealing with things like an adult, and I didn’t want to wait until the events of the story shaped her into that adult. I figured I could chalk it up to “the wrong book for me, and the wrong reader for the book”.

But…I finished the book, and realized that I was wrong. It’s not a coming-of-age story. Mary doesn’t grow up. She’s no wiser or smarter or more reasoned than she was at the start of the book. She makes the same selfish, foolhardy, impassioned, irrational decisions all the way through the book, and for the most part she never really has to sit down and face the fact that that’s a really stupid thing to do in the best of times, and even more so in the kind of dire, fight-for-survival, life-or-death situations that she finds herself in.

And, the more I think about it, the more I remember other coming-of-age stories that I did enjoy. A Companion To Wolves comes first to my mind as a story about a boy growing into a man that never once left me sitting there grinding my teeth wishing the main character would stop acting so darned childish. But also Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart, which tops the list of my favorite books of all time. Phedre spends a lot of time in that book being thoughtlessly privileged and capricious and self-absorbed, but it never irked me the way that this did.

I also hard time connecting emotionally with Mary, for a number of reasons. Mary does a lot of navel-gazing during the book, and that sort of constant introspection made me impatient to get on with the action. And a large part of her thoughts throughout the book revolve around her feelings for a certain boy. Now, I absolutely love a good love story, and it doesn’t take a lot to make me throw myself behind the main romance in a book and cheer for it for all I’m worth. But it does take more than telling the main character telling me she loves somebody, and then never showing me why. There’s no substance to it, it’s not built on anything more than Mary’s say-so, and in the beginning I was content to take it at face value and wait for all to be revealed in the course of the novel, but that never really happened. And I had a very hard time getting behind Mary’s feelings for this boy when they caused her to do things like stop and contemplate the color of his eyes while their house and only shelter is being invaded by the Unconsecrated.

Which, I suppose, is all a long-winded way of saying that I enjoyed the writing and the story, but the character whose eyes we saw it all through ruined it for me.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, lives a quiet life working at her stepfather’s bakery. One night, she goes out to the lake for some peace and quiet. Big mistake. She is set upon by vampires, who take her to an old mansion. They chain her to the wall and leave her with another vampire, who is also chained. But the vampire, Constantine, doesn’t try to eat her. Instead, he implores her to tell him stories to keep them both sane. Realizing she will have to save herself, Sunshine calls on the long-forgotten powers her grandmother began to cultivate in her when she was a child. She transforms her pocketknife into a key and unchains herself–and Constantine. Surprised, he agrees to flee with her when she offers to protect him from the sun with magic. They escape back to town, but Constantine knows his enemies won’t be far behind, which means that he and Sunshine will have to face them together.

I have been a fan of Robin McKinley’s for a long time. Beauty was the first book I ever checked out from my high school library and I absolutely loved it, I read Chalice just a few months ago and loved it, too. There have been a few exceptions — I still haven’t managed to finish Deerskin, for example — but for the most part I love them, and love them well enough that pretty much any McKinley book is an instant-purchase. So when I found out that she’d ventured out from YA and written an adult novel — and one about vampires, no less — Well. Be still my heart.

Sunshine lived up to most of my expectations. The first section of the book (it’s broken up into four “parts”, and I was sucked into this book so strongly that I was nearly three-quarters of the way through it before I realized that it didn’t have any chapters) is absolutely fabulous. I’ve neglected sleep, work, and even sustenance over my addiction to this book. Sunshine’s voice is very different from what I’m used to from McKinley, but absolutely delightful. I loved seeing baking through her eyes, and much like Chalice made me really wish that I liked honey more than I do, Sunshine made me really wish that I could manage to bake a loaf of bread that didn’t turn into a sour brick. And Constantine — I don’t have words for how much I loved Constantine. You could chain me up in a crumbling ballroom with him any day.

I did have a few nits — Sunshine has a tendency to tell us about the way her world works, and I felt this bogged the story down, especially the latter half. I would have much preferred to be shown these things, and spared the infodump. There are also some well-meaning types in the book who keep asking Sunshine to put put her life on hold, and herself in danger, in order to help them out with their fight against the Others that threaten humanity, and I kept wanting Sunshine to put her foot down and tell them to stop ordering her around and assuming that when they said “Jump,” she’d answer, “How high?” That said, though, while Sunshine’s reactions may not have always been what I wanted her to do, I did think that they were incredibly realistic for the situations she found herself in, much more so than many vampire books I’ve read. Goodness knows, I probably would have been just as scared out of my wits and overwhelmed as she was. Likely more so.

Also, from a purely selfish-reader perspective, I wanted much more of Con than I actually got. But in all fairness, McKinley could’ve had Con jumping in on every page and it probably still wouldn’t have been enough for me.

Despite my few minor complaints, I did really enjoy this book. It’s definitely a keeper, and I’m sure it will be one of the books that I routinely pull off my shelves to reread favorite passages.

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

In a world where malices—remnants of ancient magic—can erupt with life-destroying power, only soldier-sorcerer Lakewalkers have mastered the ability to kill them. But Lakewalkers keep their uncanny secrets—and themselves—from the farmers they protect, so when patroller Dag Redwing Hickory rescued farmer girl Fawn Bluefield, neither expected to fall in love, join their lives in marriage, or defy both their kin to seek new solutions to the perilous split between their peoples.

As Dag’s maker abilities have grown, so has his concern about who—or what—he is becoming. At the end of a great river journey, Dag is offered an apprenticeship to a master groundsetter in a southern Lakewalker camp. But as his understanding of his powers deepens, so does his frustration with the camp’s rigid mores with respect to farmers. At last, he and Fawn decide to travel a very different road—and find that along it, their disparate but hopeful company increases.

Fawn and Dag see that their world is changing, and the traditional Lakewalker practices cannot hold every malice at bay forever. Yet for all the customs that the couple has challenged thus far, they will soon be confronted by a crisis exceeding their worst imaginings, one that threatens their Lakewalker and farmer followers alike. Now the pair must answer in earnest the question they’ve grappled with since they killed their first malice together: When the old traditions fail disastrously, can their untried new ways stand against their world’s deadliest foe?

Horizon is the fourth book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife series, and picks up pretty much immediately where Passage left off, with protagonists Fawn and Dag and their small group of farmer and Lakewalker friends about to embark on the long (and long-awaited) trek back home. I really enjoyed the supporting characters that we got to know in Passage, so I was pleased to see that they all had significant roles to play in this book too, as well as some new faces.

In fact, I was very impressed with Bujold’s ability to handle this cast of characters. When Dag and Fawn’s party swelled to twenty-five people, most of them new and unfamiliar, I was skeptical that she’d be able to pull it off without it feeling crowded, jumbled, or confused, or without some members of the throng being neglected on-page. But my worries never came to fruition — the characters were all distinct individuals, and I never got confused between them or felt like they were there to serve a purpose and then cast aside to be forgotten.

This book (and, indeed, the whole series) is rife with cultural conflict and bitterness between her farmer and Lakewalker characters, but Bujold never resorts villainizing one side, or even one character. Farmers and Lakewalkers alike do foolish or cowardly or noble or terrible things, and many of their actions are born out of the best of intentions, or in service of their own laudable and understandable intentions. I was really impressed with how deftly she handled these interactions and subtleties.

The Sharing Knife series was my first introduction to Lois McMaster Bujold’s work. I’ve enjoyed every one of these books, and Horizon was no exception. The plot starts at a slow-but-enjoyable simmer, carried along by the reader’s vested interest in the characters and conflicts. But when the action comes, it does so swiftly and mercilessly, and left me frantic to know how it would all work out. I will definitely be looking for more of Bujold’s books, and keeping my fingers crossed that this is not, as it seems to be, the end of Fawn and Dag’s story.