The Forest of Hands and Teeth ~ Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth #1)
★★★☆☆
We are our own memory-keepers, and we have failed ourselves.
Honestly, I lowkey hated the first two thirds of this. It was dreadful. Dreadful isn't even the right word for it. It was like a soap opera set in a middle school being relayed to you on the cringest tumblr account imaginable. It was a time capsule from 2009. #10yearchallenge to the extreme. There was no personality. The atmosphere was minimal. Not a single character had a personality. The passing of time as imperceptible -- months passed and I hadn't even known it was a new day. The "love story" is almost nonsensical. Their attraction is explained through exposition and the tension consists of the two of them sitting next to each other. How riveting. Just like the 6th grade. It was just a little bit mind-numbing.
This was written similarly to Lois Lowry's The Giver, and while I love most of her work, I admit that she's has a pretty boring style. It works for middle grade but not really for YA.
However! The last third was actually pretty darn good. It actually got just a little bit meta and started criticizing its own faults, analyzing its own characters and asking them, "what even are your motivations?" It's a little bad that it even had to do that, but at least I got some substance out of this.
The last part had a lot of tension, a lot of atmosphere, and even made me cry a little. Some of the characters did things that made no sense given their crappy characterization, but it was still pretty okay. I was surprised how it ended, and actually really appreciated how it subverted some tropes.
That's just the way life is. Some days you wake up and the beach is clear and you forget about everything that surrounds us. And some days you wake up and it looks like this. That's the nature of the tides.
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