Pages

Monday, August 23, 2010

Dead-Tossed Waves review

The Dead-Tossed Waves
by Carrie Ryan
Delacorte Books for Young Readers

2010

This sequel to The Forest of Hands and Teeth takes place a generation after the events of the first novel. Timid Gabrielle has grown up in the lighthouse at the edge of town of Vista. Her mother Mary has always been an outsider. As teens are often wont to do, Gabry's friends Cira and Catcher like to tempt fate by slipping past the town's protective wall into the edge of the woods near an old abandoned amusement park. On the one night that Gabry finally gives in to peer pressure and breaks the rules, they are attacked by zombies called Mudo. Catcher is infected, and after a harrowing escape, Cira is taken in to face trial. Sentenced to join The Recruiters, the town's protective guard, with no possibility of emigrating to the larger city up the shore, Cira loses all hope. Gabry feels wracked with guilt.

In such a grim post-apocolyptic world, you have to wonder how people manage to go on. The book addresses that, with Cira becoming determinedly suicidal. The plot thickens when it turns out that Catcher has a super-rare immunity, allowing him to walk amongst the normally murderous Mudo with ease. In the meantime, Gabry meets Elias, a mysterious young man who has been living on the edge of what is left of civilization, with a bizarre religious cult of zombie-worshippers, people who believe that allowing themselves to become infected is their ticket to immortality.

Gabry struggles with her doubts, as she wonders if the infected retain any of their humanity, or if they can be cured. She is also stunned to learn that she's adopted -- a secret that her adoptive mother Mary has kept from her.  She's torn between Catcher and Elias, who each offer completely different opportunities for her.  A terrifying return to Mary's village raises the stakes (if that were possible!) with a buffalo-stampede horde of zombies in pursuit.

Scary, grim, and fast-paced, this is a solid return to the world of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which unearths a few more tantalizing clues on how the post-apocolyptic world order came to be shaped after the devastating zombie invasion.


I
borrowed this book from the library.

2 comments:

  1. I should read this. The first book always intrigued me but I haven't gotten to it either. I think the cover is creepy; I liked the cover of the first book better.
    Alison Can Read

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like the cover... I think it's been re-done though.

    http://carrie-me.blogspot.com/2009/04/cover-for-dead-tossed-waves.html

    I don't normally go for horror, but for some reason this series didn't bother me.

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails