The Girl with All the Gifts - M.R. Carey

[goodreads]

Title: The Girl with All the Gifts
Author: M.R. Carey
Genre: Dystopian, Suspense
Rating: 4.5/5
# pages: 435 pages
Date read: March, 2016

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.


DEFINITELY not your average zombie novel... And I think I need to revisit my attitude of "not liking zombie novels". Between this, "Feed" and "The Forest of Hands and Teeth" I'm constantly being proven wrong.

But like I said - this is definitely not your run-of-the-mill zombies. Melanie is a fully cognisant human being, with the capacity to focus on other things than her hunger. She feels love, fear, empathy, is insanely intelligent and makes connections to other people. And it is those connections (not to mention, the way other people respond to her) that makes this such a fascinating book. I couldn't put it down.

I'm glad "The Girl with All the Gifts" turned out to be a stand-alone novel. 20 pages before the end, I wondered how on earth they were going to wrap everything up in time, but M. Carey took a completely different track than I had expected, making for an unusual, but totally satisfactory ending.