The Girl with all the Gifts

The Girl with all the Gifts
author: M. R. Carey
published by: Orbit
released: January 14th 2014
pages: 460
my rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars












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 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 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.

I started reading this book, knowing only as much as stood on the back of the book, so basically I had no idea what this book was about but was very interested nonetheless.

It turned out that this book is basically about zombies- there called hungries not zombies but they behave like zombies, with the whole eating humans and being basically dead thing, so to me they are zombies anyway. I was a little disappointed about that because it was not what I was expecting and to be honest, I think the whole world-overrun-by-zombies/ hungries/ Cranks, etc. is getting a little old, but I kept reading because I hoped it wouldn't focus on that aspect to much. I didn't have a problem with it most of the time and I can't really say it should have been left out because it is a really important part of the book and without the zombies nothing in the book could have happened, so I guess I liked it in a way.

In the end, I enjoyed the plot - it was ok, not something completely new but still enjoyable.
But what made the whole book so much better and unique was the main character Melanie. She was by far my favorite aspect of the entire book. If the whole book had been narrated from her point of view, I would have probably rated much higher but unfortunately that wasn't the case.
Why do I like Melanie so much? Well, first of all she is basically a kid, but unbelievably smart! Reading from a kids perspective is always interesting, but I'm not even sure if you can call Melanie a kid. In many ways she is but also isn't. Also she has this huge crush on her teacher Miss Justineau and it was so great reading about Melanie trying to help and protect her, even though she's the one who would actually need protection. Since Melanie remembers nothing from before her life in the cell, the cell and the classroom are the only places she remembers. At first I thought she was really naiv to trust and/ or wanting everyone to like her- even the people holding a gun to her head but she doesn't know anything else. And obviously she's different from everyone else somehow, it was kind of obvious way before Melanie found out but you'll have to find that out on your own anyway.

The other people in the book were not as great in my opinion. Obviously we have Miss Justineau but even though Melanie loves her, I just thought she was nice. She treats Melanie like a human being and not like some kind of speaking experiment that can blow up any minute (she can't actually blow up :) ).  I understand why Melanie loves her but she definitely isn't perfect or god-like the was Melanie thinks.
Then theres Dr. Caldwell. She isn't a nice person and I don't think you're supposed to like her, which is good because I hated her. She thinks Melanie is the key to finding a cure to the disease and basically wants to cut her open and slice her brain into pieces. So since Melanie is my favorite character in the book, you can imagine why I didn't quite like Dr. Caldwell. But at the same time I had this feeling while reading, that maybe she's right, since she does want to save humanity and that was really frustrating.
Sergent Parks is the soldier of the group and at first I didn't like him either, but he changes his whole mindset during the course of the book and in the end I did like him.
The last character in the book is Gallagher. I didn't really care about him. He was nice, I guess but other than that I didn't feel much about him.

I think that even if you don't like zombies you should still give this book a try. It isn't like the typical zombie books and Melanie makes this otherwise ok book into something truly special.