The Girl with All the Gifts

This book does great things with a totally cliched premise. At first it was just the tight, evocative, perfectly paced writing that kept me enjoying it, but ultimately it took the story in a much more interesting direction than the expectation the initial premise gave me.

Content warning: in the first few pages there is a scene chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust. I don't think that's accidental, and I do think it's actually appropriate for where the book will ultimately go, but I wish I'd been warned about it because I had a really intense visceral reaction to that.

This isn't just a zombie story like all the others; it's different and you would totally not expect it. There are basically two different types of hungries(zombies). (I won't spoil)

The story is mostly centered around the relationship of Melanie and Justineau, a classroom teacher.
Sergeant Parks is quite strict and disciplined; especially towards Melanie, he does open up to her eventually halfway through the book.

This story has Greek mythology references, I personally liked it and it makes me like the teacher faster.
Melanie lives inside a cell, where every day Parks come and get her with a couple of soldiers with a gun in his hand aiming at Melanie's head, strapped in a wheelchair they move her to the classroom where Justineau, the teacher, teaches Melanie and other kids about basically everything; Melanie loves it when Justineau reads stories out loud to the class room.

Moreover, Melanie has many questions and is quite an observant girl, things are starting to change slowly when some of her class mates doesn't return to class anymore; they got taken away randomly. Now... It's Melanie's turn to be taken away and from here on out and everything is going to get BAD SHIT CRAZY.

A must read if you like thrillers, horror and of course zombie stories.

This book does great things with a totally cliched premise. At first it was just the tight, evocative, perfectly paced writing that kept me enjoying it, but ultimately it took the story in a much more interesting direction than the expectation the initial premise gave me.

Content warning: in the first few pages there is a scene chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust. I don't think that's accidental, and I do think it's actually appropriate for where the book will ultimately go, but I wish I'd been warned about it because I had a really intense visceral reaction to that.

I very much liked Carey's graphic novels, 'Lucifer' and 'The Unwritten', and read my way through several of the Felix Castor books. When this one drew an enthusiastic review from Marl Lawrence, I decided to give it a go.

It's a quick read, mainly because it doesn't let you go. It's a post-apocalyptic scenario (written in the present tense, it sometimes seems it didn't have far to travel from the movie story-board which preceded it) that often reminded me of John Wyndham, a mash-up of 'The Midwich Cukoos', 'The Day of the Triffids' and 'The Trouble with Lichen' perhaps.

Oddly, the use of the present tense throughout creates a kind of distancing effect, so that the characters all seem to be subjects of an experiment, even though the narrative voice suggests that it is their POV that the reader shares. It's as if a member of Oulipo decided to write a zombie story.

Anyway, it's very good.

I don't like horror at all, and I'm really tired of zombie stories, but nonetheless I really enjoyed this book. Set in a post-zombie-apocalypse England, the story follows a very small number of characters centering around Melanie, a child born after the zombie plague outbreak (they're never actually called zombies in the book, but "the hungry" -- but they're reanimated mindless deceased with an irresistable instinct to eat living flesh, so yeah zombies). When the story starts, Melanie and her classmates are essentially imprisoned in an army camp where doctors are trying to study the cause of the plague and to find a cure. The story starts from Melanie's perspective so neither she nor the reader understand exactly what's going on -- she's never known anything different from this world, and she knows only what the teachers tell her. The first part of the book is really hard to put down as we slowly start to understand what's going on as Melanie herself pieces it together.

After the army base is attacked and overrun by zombies, Melanie, her favourite teacher Miss Justineau, a doctor, and two soldiers manage to escape and the remainder of the book follows a somewhat more standard escape-the-zombies type story as they try to traverse zombie territory to make it to the last remaining uninfected city of Beacon (somewhere on the other side of what used to be London). On the way the doctor is obsessively continuing to try and learn more about the zombie pathogen and whether a cure might be possible. As a biologist I particularly enjoyed the care the author took to make the science believable and realistic; the zombie disease itself is a mutant strain of a real parasitic fungus that does actually exist but only infects ants.

Overall the first half of the book was stronger than the second, which was mainly a zombie thriller, but it still had some interesting surprises and character interactions. I listened to this as an audiobook and had trouble putting it down; finished in about two days. Highly recommended!

One of the rare cases where i had to stop after 30% of the book. The characters and the style of writing are sadly really boring to me 😥

Gamma

Alpha : The Hobbit
Beta : Harry Potter
Gamma : Old Man and the Sea

Gamma

Alpha : The Hobbit
Beta : Harry Potter
Gamma : Old Man and the Sea

I found myself not caring what happened to any of the characters. I'm giving up on this one half way through.

This book wasn't the typical Zombie like book, which was one reason why I liked it as much as I did. Melanie really did have a little the gifts, and this book did a really good job of proving it.
I'll read more books by this author.

This is a compulsively readable book you should not attempt if you are sensitive to animal/child harm, abuse toward children, genocide, or the end of human life on earth.

Um.

I liked that the book went there, but if you're not gonna like it, fail out early because it gets grimmer.

So the relationship that pulls you into this book is Melanie's crush on her teacher, Ms. Justineau. Melanie is quite young, and the crush is chaste, but she's carrying a torch the size of the Chicago fire of 1871. Unfortunately for Melanie, Ms Justineau, and all other humans, this takes place against the backdrop of the research centre at the end of the world, where she is a subject.

Over the course of the book Melanie learns why she is a research subject, what there is to be learned from her, and how far she will go for Ms. Justineau.

I loved this book, but oh my god. Do not go in if you're gonna find it upsetting. Ask me if you need to know more.