The Girl with All the Gifts
Ratings391
Average rating4
Fairly good, satisfying for sure, but some annoying bits of bad writing.
Pros:
-Main ending was satisfying
-Page turner
-All that you want from a zombie survival book
Cons:
-2/5 character arcs ended in a way I didn't like (Justineau and Gallagher). Others were good and I was quite pleased with Caldwell's final scene
-Some notably low moments with immersion-breaking bad writing. Otherwise good quality
-Thematically predictable
“The horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand.”
I really enjoyed this book. Was it perfect? No, however it was a great experience. Ever though I began reading it at the beginning of the month and then I didn't get to finish it for almost an entire month due to unforeseen schedule disruptions, it was incredibly easy to get back into the story. A few things were somewhat predictable here and there but my enjoyment was not affected.
Highlights:
- Melanie (I adored Melanie's POV, my heart broke for her and I think I would have reacted almost as Miss Justineau)
- the science behind the zombie apocalypse (I thought it was really cool and in theory it sounded so realistic that it creeped me out)
- the ending (I don't see how it could have ended better than this)
John Wyndham meets Richard Matheson
And this is what the meeting of those two minds would have looked like. Thoroughly enjoyable with a novel beginning and spine-chilling ending. The middle was rather run-of-the-mill though, the usual scavenging and avoiding enemies both living and dead. What made the story stick out for me though was the writing style, he has just the right balance of humour, if you can call it that. Not that the book is funny in any way, it is just that the story has just the right entertainment value, lighter in some places than in others but never becoming really dark or bogged down. Every character was human, even the ones who weren't! In a genre that has become overcrowded, this really stands up head and shoulders above the rest.
★★★ out of 5 stars. See this and other book reviews at spikegelato.com/2016/08/19/review-the-girl-with-all-the-gifts/
Summary: In zombie-overrun England, Melanie, a child with a unique mutation of a zombie-like virus, is locked away in a cell on an army research base. Scientists believe that her mutation can unlock a cure for the disease running rampant across the world, but their research methods are severe and time is short.
Review: Melanie provides a very compelling lens through which to view this story. She sees almost nothing of the world, but latches onto every small detail she can from what her teachers or supervisors say. This leads her to discover her otherness and eventually come to grips with it. It's refreshing to hear the thoughts from the “zombie perspective” rather than the usual survivor story.
My interest in the story started to sag considerably once Melanie and the other characters left the mysterious military base and hit the road. Melanie's perspective was neglected in a significant way in favor of other less intriguing points of view. The story really thrived as you discovered the world through Melanie's eyes, so it's exciting to hear that author M.R. Carey has announced a prequel novel that will hopefully delve deeper into Melanie's past.
Thanks to an original protagonist this book avoided the usual tropes of this will trodden genre and added quite an emotional punch from the start. The impact may have been due to being a father of a young girl but this book gripped me from the start and has become one of my favourite books.
“...The scar doesn't bother her. If anything, it takes his face out of the category of symmetrical and ordered things to which everybody else's face belongs. It's a face like the throw of a dice. She likes that arbitrariness, instinctively. It's something she's drawn to.
What she doesn't like is the cruelties in his past, and in hers, over which she'll have to crawl to get to him. She wishes she'd never told him that she was a murderer. She wishes that she was pristine, in his mind, so that touching him might feel like booting up a different version of herself. But that's not how you get reborn, if you ever can....” Chapter 68.
This book brought a fresh outlook on the zombie apocalypse scene. I can appreciate the new zombies, despite their odd and highly impossible creation, but I felt that it was still lacking. Melanie's point of view was fascinating and I wish majority of the book was written from her perspective. I did not see a point to Gallagher's character, if anything he seemed like filler, though admittedly without him we would not have seen the intelligence of the hungry kids from a first hand perspective, but this may have been incorporated into a different character witnessing it. I also found the fungus interesting, but it was a bit too scientific for me, my brain couldn't really pick apart the language when Caldwell's point of view came around. I suppose this could have been the entire reason for the diction, to hone in on her being a scientist, in fact the last scientist alive. Overall I was on the fence about liking this book, thus the three stars.
Por fin una novela que se anima a innovar en el mundo de la literatura acerca de zombies!! Es refrescante ver un planteo completamente diferente respecto a una temática ya de por si saturada de series, películas y publicaciones, y que en los últimos años ha llegado prácticamente a agotar tanto al género como a quienes disfrutan de los muertos vivos.
Tiene grandes momentos, uno conecta con los personajes de inmediato, y es realmente interesante ver como a medida que van transcurriendo las situaciones, algunos recorren un camino de humanización trascendental... mientras que otros parecen llevar el camino exactamente opuesto.
Además ofrece planteos de cierta profundidad que, sin llegar a excavar a niveles filosóficos, si dejan al lector pensando respecto a ciertos temas de mayor trascendencia que los habituales en este tipo de literatura.
100% recomendable.
Great idea - inconsistencies threw me out of the story. Basically if the Dr showed, it was to do something solely to move people through some random decisions. We have living, growing research subjects - we won't try to actually cure the disease with medication or even seeing if they can have self control. Let's teach them relevant things like calculus and mythology and see how their brains differ?! Lets burn the food in a funeral. And so on.
The whole idea of the brain fungus and how it worked was fun.
I fell in love with M.R Carey thanks to The Girl with All The Gifts.
This book is a must read for any horror fans especially fans of the slightly over saturated zombie/infection genre, that being said you cant compare this book to anything similar that's come before.
The setting (based in the UK) works perfectly with the story, it's nice to see a story based in the UK and UK horror of this style (i.e 28 days later) has its own style and feel vs Hollywood style zombie fiction.
Why does this work so well? Firstly, the characters, Melanie is a loveable lead character with believable motives, she loves Miss Justineau and will do anything to protect her, Miss Justineau is a well fleshed out character with a strong back story that means you understand her motives and reasoning when you might otherwise question what she does. Finally, and my favorite is Sargent Parks, Parks starts off as the “Bad guy” in the story keeping space between Melanie and Miss Justineau but again Parks is such a well fleshed out character that you understand his reasoning, he's scared yet everyone is looking to him for answers.
I won't say much more as I'll have to get into spoilers but let me just say this book is so underrated, The Girl with All The Gifts is a must read for any horror fans and one I will recommend to everyone who will listen!
A very good book. This was one of my favorite post-apocalyptic books I've read. The story never dragged and the pacing was great. I would recommend this book to others. An 8 on my 10 point rating scale.
Pros: thought provoking, fascinating characters, interesting premise, tight prose
Cons:
Melanie loves the story of Pandora. She loves attending Miss Justineau's class, where she heard the legend. She doesn't love Sergeant Parks, who sometimes makes Miss Justineau look sad, or Dr. Cauldwell, who's responsible for some of her classmates going away and never coming back. She likes her routine, and when that routine changes, all of their lives are irrevocably altered.
This is a post-apocalyptic story with zombies (called hungries) that will feel very familiar. But Carey's prose and storytelling ability makes it a brilliant addition to the subgenres.
The book alternates between several viewpoints but starts with Melanie, explaining her day, her week, her life. She's such an intelligent girl and the author manages to explain so much of what's happening - and what's wrong in the world - by her observations of her normal life. Pay close attention, as there's a lot of detail, with certain things being inferred rather than told outright.
I loved the rivalry between Miss Justineau and Dr. Cauldwell, both of whom believe very strongly that they're in the right about the issues they face, and it's hard at times to say they aren't, even when their points of view are opposite. There are some great thought provoking moments, particularly around Dr. Cauldwell's work and Melanie's coming of age. Even Sergeant Parks has some introspection as he questions the experiments he's been helping.
The book is definitely geared more for suspense than horror, though there are some horrifying scenes. The ending too, will remind readers of a memorable horror novel. The real question of the book lies in whether Dr. Cauldwell will find a cure for the hungries, and if the means she uses justify the ends she's trying to achieve.
The story starts slow in order to really introduce the characters and the world before things get messy. The prose is tight, and the story, while not fast paced, is highly compelling. It's a brilliant novel.
I HATE ZOMBIE STORIES, I should get that out of the way up front.
So why this book? Well, I put this book on my TBR list based on a tweet from the director of the most recent Much Ado About Nothing movie and a vague, yet promising, book blurb. If I'd waited until it was reviewed, or more detailed descriptions were available, I probably wouldn't have started this. Having started it, and then figuring out what it's about, I stopped reading it several times during the first two hundred pages – but I was usually waiting for something with nothing else to read, or was curious about how the next chapter would deal with plot point X. Before I knew it, I was 50% done, so I might as well finish.
There's a little more to it than that – this book just got me, and I couldn't stop reading it, really. Little Melanie – in all her innocent, caring, devoted, Zombie genius glory, is delightful. This book is a wonderful combination of childhood optimism, stark darkness, hope, love, despair and megalomania . . . told in a voice that's in the same breath amusing and gut wrenching.
This is another one of those that I don't know how to talk about without spoiling in on multiple fronts. Carey (author of the Felix Castor UF books and The Unwritten comics – and many other things I haven't gotten around to) has created something special here, something unlike anything else I've read from him. Think Let the Right One In, but endearing and without the creepy sexual vibe. That's not entirely accurate, but it's not inaccurate, either.
I guess let's just leave it as this: it's a zombie novel, that I couldn't put down and almost gave 5 stars to. Pretty remarkable accomplishment by my standards.
I'm a sucker for dystopian environments, and this one hit the sweet spot of optimism coupled with grit and a high level look at why the world is the way it is. The star of the story is the relationship between Melanie, a 10 year old genius girl, and her teacher. Melanie doesn't know it, but a fungal infection has taken over the worlds, and taken over her. It has turned the worlds population into “hungries” – zombies. The story unfolds as Melanie learns how she is different, and how she can fit into this new world.
I've watched a lot of zombie movies, TV shows and post-apocalyptic tales, and this one holds up. I'm excited to see a movie is in the works set to release in 2016!
This was the best zombie story I've ever read. I've been trying to branch out to new writers, so I picked this up thinking there was no way it was Mike Carey, author of Lucifer and The Unwritten and one of my all time favorite comic book writers. It was. He handled himself quite well with prose, which was fascinating, as most comic book writers have a hard time transitioning. All of his major themes were there, including the parts where the plot seems to be wandering off course, only to have everything come veering back into place towards the end just time to enforce a tremendous impact of an ending. No one does endings like Carey. (I'm very excited to see how he wraps up the Unwritten this year.) This book won't change your life but it's an incredible thriller.
Carey has a very cinematographic writing here. No surprise that the book already has a movie. I'm not very into zombie stories, but the central idea that the author brought to the table in this book is very interesting and I was hooked up. Good narrative, good characters, good book.
Cordyceps turning people into zombies? Hell yeah, count me in. Really liked this novel. Great setting, interesting characters, classic themes, and a fitting ending.
My only gripe is that it relies heavily on tropes regarding treatment of infected and military. If it's your thing (and it is mostly my thing), this reads like a SyFy Channel original and that's evident in the movie adaptation. I strongly recommend reading the book before watching the movie.
“The Girl with All the Gifts” is a hugely cinematic reading experience, set in a post apocalyptic Great Britain.
I guess I was taken in by the opening, as you know something is afoot when a young girl is strapped into a chair with no ability to move her limbs, and then force fed something no normal child would eat or want to eat either.
When you find out that the foreword is written by none other than Joss Whedon himself, and that the author is producing a screenplay at the same time as writing said novel, then it's winner winner chicken dinner.
Though I've not seen “The Walking Dead”, it has that kind of feel to it - atmospheric, dramatic yet personal and touching at the same time.
The novel didn't end how I wanted it to, but it certainly made for an enjoyable and thrill packed read.
Painful, but damn good. As many reviewers say, this book is a surprisingly good read. I don't often read zombie stories, but when I do I prefer to read ones like this. This book joins the apparently growing subgenre of different zombie tales.
I found the story fascinating from the first pages to the end. The shocking reveal had me gasping, but loyal to the book and the character. Well done.
This book goes into the science of the causes for humans becoming hungries, and takes a hard twist at the end that is shocking and heart-wrenching. Enjoy!
such a fantastic book.
it's a thought experiment taken a million steps further. The complexities it covers are far beyond what you might expect from the scope of the book - morality, humanity, mortality and so much more.
if you come into it looking for yet another zombie novel, you might go out of it surprised, with a lot of questions you never thought you'd be asking.