A Life Spent Reading

As you can see, the cover is emo teen girl stuck in barren, spooky forest, and that would work pretty well as a one-line summary of the plot itself. But as one might suspect from the title, the level of writing is a cut above average, and that saves this book.

Mary lives in a post-apocalyptic world, a member of a village in the middle of a forest cut off from the rest of humanity – if the rest of humanity still even exists – by the presence of hordes of zombies. The village is run by a matriarchal sisterhood who cling to their secrets and time-worn methods of keeping everyone safe from said zombies. Naturally, this means sticking mainly to the village. But there’s a problem: Mary wants to see the ocean.

There isn’t really much plot here, just a girl turning into a woman and desiring more from her life than to be stuck in a zombie-surrounded village, married off to an eligible boy who she doesn’t really want. When the village is finally overrun one day, she gets her chance. She and a small group of friends survive and escape into the forest, and the second half of the book is about their attempts to stay alive.

There are plenty of chances for an unskilled writer to founder, but Ryan pulls this rather lackluster concept off quite well… remarkably well, in fact, for a first-timer. There isn’t a lot of horror, despite the concept, and there isn’t any sex, and the whole thing could easily have been a YA version of The Handmaid’s Tale gone very very wrong. But I found the book enjoyable, and will read the sequel when it comes out this March.