Review Take Two: The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Title: The Girl with All the Gifts
Author: M.R. Carey
Genre: horror, dystopia
Series: none
Pages: 460
Published: June 6, 2014
Source: publisher via Netgalley
Rating: 5 out of 5

NOT EVERY GIFT IS A BLESSING

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class.

When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh.

Melanie is a very special girl.

Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will read this year.

Reviewed by Danielle. 

Have you ever read a book and knew, knew it would change you, irrevocably, before the end of the first chapter? It’s a rare and powerful thing to behold, but by the time Melanie said she wouldn’t bite, I knew I would never be able to forget her or The Girl With All The Gifts.

I want my readers to do me a favor. I’m going to keep this review vague, but this is the kind of book where everything is a potential spoiler. So don’t read this review. Instead, run, do not walk, to your nearest bookstore and buy the book. Read this book, regardless of your usual preferences. I don’t read horror books. I don’t read thrillers. I don’t read zombie books. This is a five star, genre-defying experience.

Go now.

If you still need convincing, the writing is stupendous. Carey’s word choices sing. I’ve never highlighted so many passages in a fiction book, because I never want to forget lines like:

If the lad had killed the junkers himself, gutted them and made balloon animals out of their colons, Parks would still have done his best to put a positive spin on it.

It’s not that he’s the first writer to describe guts as balloon animals, but I’m awed by how descriptive one little sentence is and what it says of Sergeant Parks. And then there’s our first good glimpse of the villain:

Thin grey strings like shoelaces - hundreds of them - have exploded from the rat's body cavity and filled most of the interior space of the bottle, wrapped loosely around and around the little corpse as though the rat had decided to try to be an octopus and then hadn't known how to stop.

Take me now, I’m having a metaphorgasm.

But TGWATG isn’t just great writing, it asks a lot of deep, philosophical questions in an often overlooked genre. Who’s worse, the villain who’s totally up front about their villainy, the soldier who’s just following orders, or the teacher who raises a generation to think wrongly? At what point do the ends justify the means? Is it heroic or cowardice to become a martyr? There are no answers in the book, any more than there are answers in life, and I love it. Some of the characters’ decisions haunt me, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Speaking of characters, where else are you going to get a zombie novel where the scientist is the one obsessed with brains? More cleverness that slays me. The vast majority of the book is spent with a core group of five characters, each with individual verbal tics and thought patterns. They also change and grow through the book as sickness and fatigue beat them down, or revelations build them up.

TGWATG is amazing. It’s tense and scary while defying genre conventions. (But the baby carriage? There’s not enough “no” in the world.) It’s not perfect, though, and I wish some of the revelations in London had come earlier with more time to dwell on them. The scene with the shadows on the house felt derivative of Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, (though that could just be me.) An early plotline,the junkers chasing them was unresolved, and I wish it wasn’t. Still, I’m completely confident in giving The Girl With All the Gifts five stars and recommending it to horror, dystopian, sci-fi, or mythology fans or just people who can’t get enough of beautiful prose, like myself.

Review: The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Title: The Girl With All the Gifts
Author: M.R. Carey
Genre: horror, zombies
Series: N/A
Pages: 416
Source: I got this book for free at Book Expo America in for a review. This in no way affects my rating or thoughts.
Rating: 4.5/5

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her "our little genius." 

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh. 

Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

"She's lived in Plato's cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she's been turned around to face the fire."

The Girl With All the Gifts is a weird, disturbing, creepy, and fun book. It somehow manages to be both thoughtful and gory, without overdoing either. It has a story that manages to freak you out while making you think about human nature and humanity in general. M.R. Carey refuses to do what you expect and this odd and satisfying post-apocalyptic gem is the result. Pandora may have opened the box that let the darkness out, but M.R. Carey explores the shadows of humanity so well it was worth it.

The best way to read The Girl With All the Gifts is with an open mind. In daytime. The blurb is small and bland for a reason. The author has a lot to cover with the four hundred pages of the novel and he puts on one hell of a show for the duration if you have the patience for the story to build. But, if you must have a spoilerish comparison: It felt like reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go mashed up with Mira Grant's Parasite. It's not all action-packed or hungry gorging, but also a thoughtful and philosophical exploration of people. Carey has an even hand with all of that and with the steady characterization of Parks, Justineau, Gallagher, and Melanie. It's a lot to juggle with any kind of satisfaction, but Carey manages it with aplomb and finesse.
  After everything, it's hard to discuss the finer points of the novel for the reasons stated in the previous paragraph. I would hate to spoil anything of the total effect and atmosphere that The Girl With All the Gifts carries. So that makes it hard to to register my few complaints. The first was that the villain was slightly too one-dimensional to be entirely believable or for my taste and that what would the food source be now that Melanie has turned everyone into hungries? How will there be a full second generation or third if there is no food? Besides those small issues, I was overjoyed with the unconventional routes that Carey continued to take with his story up until the very end.

 The Girl With All the Gifts is a near-perfect novel. I loved it from the beginning until the end; I wanted to know what happened and I simultaneously never wanted to stop reading. The characters are complex and often unlikeable, the story is bleak and still compelling, the ending is unexpected and totally authentic. A very enthusiastic and happy 4.5 stars.