I read Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth not because of a compelling desire to jump on the zombie train that seems to be going around these days (though that did help), but because of this:
So there is talk of the agony of finding out someone you love is infected and will become a zombie, and how naturally you are desperate to be with them just one more day and fall into desperate denial and cannot contemplate hurting them.
So someone Mary loves gets infected. (I will not say if it is one of the two boys in her love triangle, her brother, her cousin, or the orphan boy they adopt. You will have to read it and see!)
MARY: … HAND ME THAT SHOVEL.
Mary lives in a fenced-in village several generations after the zombie apocalypse. The village is protected by fences, which keep the lumbering hordes of zombies on one side and idiot hordes of villagers on the other; by the Guardians, who in any other context would be described as zombies themselves for all the good they do anyone; and the Sisters, who are the evil nuns running the show. Mary is also not your typical girl-heroine, in that there is no talk of flowing dark locks, unless you mean the kind one smashes through to figure out what the evil nuns are hiding, and because she is sensible and rational and awesome.
It’s the type of book where you hope there will be a sequel, not because you need to know more about what happens to the main character necessarily, but because the set-up is so interesting you want to see where else it could go. At least, I do. And apparently there will be – from Carrie Ryan’s site:
Right now I’m working on another book for Delacorte that should come out in Spring 2010. We don’t yet have a title but it’s kind of a sequel; set in the same world as The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
And it was a product of NaNoWriMo! (scroll down on that page). Which merely completes the awesome.