The Girl with All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts, #1

by M. R. Carey

Paperback, 403 pages

English language

Published June 19, 2014 by Orbit.

ISBN:: 978-0-356-50015-7

View on OpenLibrary

(107 reviews)

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.

The Girl with All the Gifts is a sensational thriller, perfect for fans of Stephen King, Justin Cronin, and Neil Gaiman.

1 edition

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'LibraryThing'

4 stars

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.

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'LibraryThing'

4 stars

Pentapod reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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!

Bodo reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

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 😥

DaveCline reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Gamma

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

Anonymole reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Gamma

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

Fred reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

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

NightDrake reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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.

Steen Christiansen reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Although I love the idea of the intelligent child zombie and the zombie origins, the story is too cliched and generic to make for a truly interesting read.

betty reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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. …

Jonathan Arnold reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Really solid end of the world book, with a believable set up and everything. The seemingly necessary "quest" in the middle slowed the book down, but otherwise really great.

cocolaco reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A real page-turner. Don't read ANYTHING about this book before reading it!

Wetdryvac reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Ruddy fabulous.

govmarley reviewed The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)

Review of 'The Girl with All the Gifts' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Totally not what I was expecting! I don't want to spoil you, because the book blurb is deliciously vague. Just enjoy your journey with Melanie, said Girl with All the Gifts, and let the story unfold.

It hits all of the good ingredients for me. Dystopian / post apocalyptic tale, survival, with a mysterious build-up and a VERY satisfying ending. I know some of you will disagree, but I liked it. 3 1/2 stars, and I think it would make a cool movie.