The Dead-Tossed Waves (Forest of Hands and Teeth, #2)

by Carrie Ryan

Gabry lives a quiet life, secure in her town next to the sea and behind the Barrier. She's content to let her friends dream of the Dark City up the coast--home is all she's ever known and all she needs for happiness.
But life after the Return is never safe.
Gabry's mother thought she left her secrets behind in the Forest of Hands and Teeth, but like the dead in their world, secrets don't stay buried. And now, Gabry's world is crumbling.
In one reckless moment, half of Gabry's generation is dead, the other half imprisoned.
Now Gabry knows only one thing: if she has any hope of a future, she must face the forest of her mother's past.

• ISBN10: 0385736851
• ISBN13: 9780385736855
• Publish Date: 1 April 2025 (first published 1 January 2010)
• Publish Status: Forthcoming
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc
• Imprint: Bantam Doubleday Dell
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 432
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780385736855

Reviews

[Angie]

Picking up many years later, The Dead-Tossed Waves is all about Mary's daughter, Gabry. She's never known anything beyond the relative safety of her seaside town, and is terrified of what lies within the forest thanks to her mother's stories. She's also never crossed the barriers into the old amusement park like the other teens. Until she does, and the dead (the locals call them Mudo) attack. Gabry runs, her friends that weren't bitten are severely punished, and she's left feeling like a coward. If only she could be as brave as her mother. Then things happen, forcing Gabry to flee and she's learning more about herself than she ever knew before.

The Dead-Tossed Waves wasn't as creepy as the first book. Gabry isn't on a slow decent into madness. She's having a personal crisis. It's very much a "who am I, what am I doing, who will I be" type of story. Gabry has always wanted to be like her mother, but she learns things that shake her small world to the core. Then she meets Elias who knows all kinds of things about the Mudo that she's never heard before, and it's all just a mess that she doesn't know how to straighten out. I wasn't as invested in her story as Mary's, but I still found her journey into the forest (of course she has to do the reverse path of her mother) very fascinating.

I do think The Dead-Tossed Waves is a worthy sequel. It fills in some of the gaps from the end of the first book in terms of what happened to Mary and her group, but it is a whole new story. The second half was much stronger for me, since that's where all of the action and danger is. It also answers some of my questions about why Mary's village was isolated the way it was. The only thing I can say I really disliked was the romance. I wasn't sold on either love interest at all. I was actually hoping that Gabry wound up being Elias' lost sister! That would have been much better!

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[nannah]

Trigger warnings: attempted rape

A friend had told me the second installment was about Mary's daughter, so I prepared myself accordingly, but I wasn't prepared for ANOTHER love triangle and another heroine who depended on the love of two boys to function, to feel self-worth and to make any decisions. There has to be something said for someone who feels the need to put two love triangles in two successive books involving separate characters. Seems a bit excessive to me . . . at least unimaginative.

So yes, I didn't like Gabry much. She did feel stronger in the end, but I felt cheated, because she kept talking about this newfound strength, and I know she only felt that way because some boy told her he loved her. She spent the whole first three-quarters of the book moaning about these two boys and that she was doing something wrong and pushing them away and then yanking them closer. Pages after pages were spent on this interior monologue that basically ran over the same issues: "I NEED HIM, OMG GET AWAY." The writing in general was a bit redundant: chapters spent discussing the same thing that happened earlier, or treating the same issues, etc.

But what really bothered me the most was the heroine's dependence on the male protagonists of the book. It seems that every YA book I pick up geared towards a more "female audience," if I have to be so stereotypical, has this same attitude. And it's starting to worry me. That, and it's plain aggravating as all heck.

I'd add more here, but I'm starting to care less and less, unfortunately. The plot didn't seem strong enough to hold its own (hence the love triangle forming most of the focus), Ryan also had to put some totalitarian-feeling controlling figure to make the book a bit more cliche as a YA book and it just went on and on, spiraling into the same issues without resolving most of them.

However, I'm being overwhelmingly negative, and I did rate this thing three stars. The climax, when it did happen, was pretty darn well-done. The scene was chilling (the not-so-much-a-waterfall concept made me literally shiver), and I started to root for the main protags in a way I hadn't done the whole book.

. . . but I might just look up a detailed summary of the third installment instead of reading it, I'm that frustrated . . . or at least I'll see if the love triangle makes a comeback. If it doesn't, I'll give The Dark and Hollow Places a shot.

[empressbrooke]

A good sequel that avoids retreading the same ground as The Forest of Hands and Teeth. It adds a few new elements that flesh out the world that it takes place in and made things more interesting (especially the zombie worshippers). It did crack me up that Gabrielle switched back and forth in her affections for Catcher and Elias so fast and frequently that she could have killed a few of the zombies by whirling their heads off, but I guess that's the obligatory YA love triangle.

[Amber]

If you read my review on Carrie Ryan’s previous book in the series “The Forest of Hands and Teeth” you’ll know that I wasn’t too impressed by it overall. Like I said in that review, I wanted to read the second book in the series because I did find the whole world that Ryan created very intriguing, even if I didn’t particularly like Mary, the main protagonist. I saw that “The Dead Tossed Waves” followed the story of Mary’s daughter instead, a fact that I was both relieved and worried about. What if Gabry was just like her mother?

Nonetheless, I read “The Dead Tossed Waves”, and ended up really liking it. The plot is a lot more organised than the plot in TFOHAT, as I felt that there was a lot more thought put into the pacing and the timeline. As in the first novel, the zombies - or “Mudo” - in this book are still my favourite part. The whole story about The Return is very interesting, and I honestly felt really connected with the story because the zombies were so realistic.

The love triangle aspect of the story is another similarity to the previous novel. Gabry struggles with her feelings for her childhood friend, Catcher, and her new, mysterious friend Elias, and a lot of the novel is based around these three people, and Gabry trying to figure out which one she should give up. I didn’t think there was much need for a love triangle in this book. A lot of authors seem to love the triangles at the moment, and I admit, sometimes they can be very interesting. However, I do not think that this love triangle did anything for the overall story. Catcher could just have easily been a good friend to Gabry, rather than a love interest.

I loved Gabry as a character. She was a lot more easy to connect with than her mother, Mary, as she is quite rightly frightened of the world outside the walls of her town. She shows fear of the Mudo and I find this to be one of her greater qualities. She’s scared, and yet she still ventures out of the town to look after her friend and to find her mother.

I also really liked Elias, who was an interesting asset to the story. However, I did not particularly like Catcher. His own story was interesting, and the twist was a nice touch but when teamed with Gabry’s, I did not find him interesting at all, and very two dimensional.

Mary was the same, selfish little girl that she was in the first book. So much for my expectations of her growing up after the demise of her friends and family! *spoiler* I mean, the day after Gabry’s friends are killed and Returned, she runs off to the Forest to go and find her old village? And then she stays there without going back to find her daughter? What kind of a mother does that?

Overall, I really did enjoy this book, and the ending is a great lead up to the next book in the series “The Dark and Hollow Places”. A few things brought this book down a peg or two, but overall I give it a 4/5, which is .5 of a star more than what I gave the last book.