I am normally terrified of zombies or anything of the sort. Seriously, I get nightmares every time I watch a zombie movie. Even Thriller scares me sometimes.

Too bad it took me a little while to realize that The Unconsecrated in “The Forest of Hands and Teeth” were essentially zombies. I was spooked, to put it mildly, but by that point the book had already hooked me and I knew it would be impossible to stop.

“The Forest of Hands and Teeth” tells the story of Mary. She lives in a village in the woods, surrounded by fences that keeps The Unconsecrated out. The Unconsecrated, as I said before, are essentially zombies and they roam the Forest of Hands and Teeth, constantly threatening the village and its people. Mary has led a simple life in her village, helping her family and waiting to be married. Then one day, when patrolling the perimeter of the fences, Mary’s father gets taken by The Unconsecrated and is assumed to be “infected.” Her mother then falls into a depression and one day gets too close to the fences and is bitten by an Unconsecrated. She chooses to join the others outside the village and suddenly Mary’s life is in a tailspin.

In the village, a woman cannot live on her own, so when no one wants to marry Mary, she is forced to live with the Sisterhood (basically nuns) in their Cathedral. Once in the Cathedral, a series of events cause Mary to begin questioning the Sisterhood and her entire life in the Village. And then the fences are breached by The Unconsecrated and everything Mary ever knew is gone.

OK, so it all sounds a little weird (and zombies are scary), but this book is absolutely addictive. I spent many nights awake until the wee hours, lost in the story. I just could not put it down, and that doesn’t happen often (especially after spending hours poring over text books). Read More »

As an English major, I was always under the impression that literary and popular fiction were genres that were fairly at odds with each other (and, coincidentally, you are supposed to like the former and scoff at the latter. My personal tastes tend to run the opposite way). It’s rare that a book can fit into both categories without the help of Oprah, but oh how I’ve found one.

Audrey Niffeneggar’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife has gained a lot of popularity since it’s 2004 release, making a permanent home in women’s book clubs worldwide because of its earnest and heartbreaking love story. But it’s really so much more than it’s blurb would suggest; it’s also a painstakingly precise, exquisitely written book.

The story is told from the perspectives of Henry and Clare DeTamble, a married couple who have to deal with the complications that have arisen in their lives from Henry’s Chrono-displacement disorder, an ailment that forces Henry to travel through time against his will.

Time travel is usually one of my least favorite genres because it leaves me with too many questions after I’m done watching or reading. Why didn’t the terminator just kill Sarah Conner as a baby? Shouldn’t Marty McFly have known that he was going to succeed at getting his parents back together because if they hadn’t then he wouldn’t be alive to go back to the future in the first place (or even time travel in the first place because Marty essentially tells Doc he would later make the time machine work in Back the Future II?) Stuff like that. I realize that there is a certain amount of suspended belief that one has to assume in entertainment, but it’s still annoying. Read More »