The Girl with All the Gifts

I'm sure I've seen this billed as a 'ya' novel (a term I hate) but it certainly isn't. That might be because the film of this (from memory) was a little watered down, despite it being a really good adaptation. This, however, should take its place up at the top of zombie type movies along with I am legend. This is a brutal version of a world in which infected humans rule and the world is not a safe place. The twist on the story is that the next generation of kids are a hybrid of infected and human. What plays out here is a first half that is reflective which sets the scene for a more action packed second half. Apart from the set up and the premise, what really impresses about this book is the characters and the character development. Characters that start out one thing become a much more fully and complex being than one might expect of such a novel. There are many themes in this book, the one that resonated with me most is what it is to be human. This was a cracking book that's close to the full 5 stars, it just most probably doesn't have a second half that's quite as original as the first half to get the full score. Very much recommended.

Romped through this on my Kindle. It reads more like a movie than a novel, and I mean that in a good way. The relentless pace and energy is intoxicating.It is not as utterly bleak and beautiful as The Road, it is not as clever and layered as Station Eleven, but still immensely enjoyable and I look forward to catching the movie at some point.

Definitely not your typical zombie novel, The Girl with All the Gifts redefines the apocalypse genre with a refreshing twist that is almost as juicy as brains.The Girl with All the Gifts is staggeringly difficult to review because it is one of those stories that is best enjoyed if you know absolutely nothing about it. If you are planning on reading this in the near future I would advise you to leave this review purely so you can have the full effect!The plot isn’t difficult to grasp, but it is incredibly far from the usual tarnished brush that all zombie apocalypse novels are painted with nowadays. The story begins with Melanie, a young girl who has spent much of her life split between school and her cell. Her cell is her hell but the school is her redemption. Especially when it’s a Miss. Justineau day. Miss. Justineau teaches Melanie and all the other children things that they never knew – facts about animals, plants, towns, maths. And sometimes she even read them stories. That was always Melanie’s favourite.It is interesting to see this vision of a fragmented world slowly build up from the perspective of this young girl, a world which she herself knows very little about and only begins to understand the extent of the Breakdown and the Hungries(as the infected are known) through the reserved insight of Miss Justneau, her own recollection of the outside world a distant memory.Her fellow classmates come and go, never to return, with no explanation or even acknowledgement from the teachers. Until the day comes for Melanie to be taken. Strapped to her chair once again, she is led to the myserious door at the end of the corridor and is slowly wheeled up, up, up, and across the open air of the main base headed towards the lab.Through a drastic turn of events, Miss Justineau attempts to save Melanie from her fate but is cut short. The base is under fire. The Hungries and Junkers, people living outside the safe cities, working together in a never before seen attack.The breach in security forces Melanie to fight for her life and flee the world she has come to know with the only person whom she trusts and loves, Miss Justineau and a few other begrudging members of the base namely Sergeant Parks, the soldier who was head of operations and Dr. Caldwell, the doctor who had Melanie on the dissection table…It doesn’t take long for Melanie to discover the truth of what she really is, the gift that she possesses and the fact that it wants her to share her gift with the world.The story is brilliant at highlighting the straining human relationships in the post apocalyptic world from the soldiers trying to keep their s*** together and Caldwell in particular striving to be the savior of humanity to the Junkers embracing the sudden paradigm shift and adapting to the new world. But it’s also refreshing to see a different point of view on the Hungries and their varying behavioral differences, an interesting change to the usual mindless zombies we see in other novels of the genre. Even more intriguing is the cause behind the Hungry phenomenon. A cause which exists in the real world today and would only need to create a strain to infiltrate the human body to sweep across the world. just let that sink in.The defining subplot of this story for me has to be the relationship between Melanie and the humans. Despite their obvious differences, Melanie finds solace in Miss Justineau, the one person that trusts her and loves her despite what she is and what shes done and she makes it her mission to protect her like the heroes in the stories she’d read. Sergeant Parks is at first apprehensive, their interaction going against every protocol that had been drilled into him but he eventually grows to like Melanie even if he still keeps his guard up. But Dr. Caldwell was the Judas of this story. She had good intentions but on the surface it was clear to see that humanity and the hungries was too far gone yet she persisted in her obligation to rescue humanity. Even if that meant cutting up children.But the heart rendering finish is truly spectacular and will leave you incredibly numb.A zombie refresh worth more than its salt. Deserved of the praise it has received thus far, it’s no surprise that Hollywood has jumped on this gem(set to be released next year) and I can’t wait to see this world humbling story brought to the big screen.This review was originally posted on: [...]

Ummm, much lorded and much splattered with impressive quotes from outlets like the Guardian and Vogue this caught my eye through recommendation and the harsh divisions it seemed to create in its readers. A marmite book, people loved or hated it. So what did I think? (Warning, whilst there aren't exactly spoilers here, it's impossible to give my view without revealing the basic themes of this story as they're the source of that passionate reader reaction.)So, deep breath, this is a book about zombies! What! You'd never get that from the cover. Well, honestly, it is and I have an inner eight year old and he totally loves zombies (woop, woop!) It's a sophisticated and clever take on the zombie-trope, fungal zombies, human civilisation sliding into that all too familiar dystopian rust-fest that happens in so many books nowadays - like dystopian is a virus infecting the collective creative mind (it's all getting a little dull and repetitive don't you think?) Anyway, the fungal infection is like the one you see on the wildlife documentaries, those spores that drive ants totally bonkers, the hyphae exuding faux-neurotransmitters that take over the host and make them little more than robot mushrooms. Mushrooms that bite!So, you get the backdrop, civilisation melted to jiggering, jerking mould that runs and bites. Hungries! (Yes, a zombie book that doesn't actually use the word once.) These zombies do everything that proper zombies do, they run and swarm and bite and are relentless and dumb and gloopily disgusting. So, check, inner eight year satisfied - yum, yum!But then, weird, so weird, MR Carey (pseudonym for some seriously good writer of Marvel and screenplays and graphic novels) does something either amazingly clever or daft. I suppose he skates the edge of genius, as that's where we're led to believe is where genius happens, in the zone between what should be done and what shouldn't. The Girl With All the Gifts tells the story of the zombie apocalypse from the inside out, it makes us like the hungries - well at least feel sorry for them - and them positively root for one of them. Our heroine, Melanie, is a new type of hungry, a sentient one, the child of an infected human with fungus running deeply through her like Blackpool through pink, sweet rock. She can stop her hungry urges, reads ancient Greek and has a crush on her teacher and is self-aware. So this is an existential zombie-book, a self-reflective zombie book and add to that that Melanie is a child our emotional buttons are being pressed and prodded in all sorts of strange places.So, what DID I think? The inner eight year loved the fast-paced screenplayesque zombie scenes, the running, jumping, shooting and splatting. The chin-clenching intellectual in me, pompous and sniffily watching the reactions of that inner eight year old wasn't convinced. Zombies and existentialist angst, interesting idea. What a great pitch! MR Carey is an undoubtably very accomplished writer with a great turn of phrase and his prose skittered somewhere between the easy-to-digest addictiveness of Pringles and the seriously-you're-having-a-laugh-with-us suspension of disbelief cutting ridiculousness of two tropes melded and mutated in a weirdly fascinating way.And that's my verdict, a weirdly fascinating book, like a hippo in a hat, walking with a cane or a flower growing a mouth and asking for marmite on toast - you'd stop to watch, but you'd not perhaps end up any the wiser and most likely simply spend the rest of the day freaked.So should you read the Girl With The Gifts? Yes, it's like watching a film it's so smoothly written but I'm not sure it actually achieves a great deal more than the running and jumping and splatting of the zombie-trope even though it is clearly reaching much, much higher. It's deepest question seems to be can horrific, merciless, vicious zombies be redeemable? A question that flips actually, in the way any experience of humanity for more than five minutes generates; are humans redeemable? Would sentient, flesh-eating zombies be more civilised than earth-destroying, human rights crushing, murderous bipedal apes that think they're something special? Quick answer; no. Zombie civilisation is most certainly a fiction, but if you listen to the World Service long enough or drink deeply from the well of history you'd be left thinking the same about human civilisation too.But genius, clever creativity and rightly lorded for that. Well done and I did eat it quickly, actually, hungrily - raaaah!But only Three Stars (***) and a facial expression like this.