Amazon Exclusive: Scott Westerfeld Reviews The Forest of Hands and TeethScott Westerfeld is the author of three sets of books for young adults, including theUglies series, theMidnighters series, and a series of stand-alone novels set in contemporary New York, includingSo Yesterday,Peeps, andThe Last Days. BothUgliesandPeepswere named Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association in 2006. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review ofThe Forest of Hands and Teeth: 
Teenagers love a good apocalypse. Who doesn't? All those annoying rules suspended. Society's pretenses made irrelevant. Malls to be looted. School out forever.
But in The Forest and Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan's marvelous debut novel, the post-apocalypse is defined more by constraints than freedoms. The book begins seven generations after the Return, an undead plague that has ended civilization as we know it. Of course, a zombie outbreak usually means shotguns and mall looting--the very essence of freedom. But more than a century on from the Return, the malls have already been looted, and shotguns are a distant memory. The novel's heroine, Mary, lives in a village surrounded by one last vestige of industrial technology: a chain-link fence, beyond which is a vast forest full of shambling, eternally ravenous undead--the forest of hands and teeth. No villager ever goes outside this fence, unless they want to die. (And given this bleak scenario, some do.)
Mary's world is bounded not only by the fence but by...
