The Girl with All the Gifts Review

This week's novel is The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey.

Oh my gosh, y'all.  This book.

I'm going to do this a little differently and give you the synopsis from Goodreads instead of writing my own:

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.

This is what the first chunk of this novel is like.  The reader knows something is wrong while Melanie takes it all as normal.  There's an inherent mystery built into this, and it's engaging and rewarding to piece together what's happening from the clues Melanie drops without knowing they're clues.  What's special about Melanie?  Where are they?  What happened to the world?

It works because Melanie's voice is so perfect.  She's naive yet intelligent, loving yet aware that some people are threats.  Her being ten and her being smart don't work against each other and she don't come off as the dreaded precocious kid.  The unfolding of the story is also helped along with short chapters from the adults' points of view interspersed throughout Melanie's story, which mainly work to shed light on the accuracy of Melanie's character judgments.

This first section is beautiful and eerie, mixing the myth of Pandora with the post-apocalypse and child-like hero worship. 

A lot of this falls away for a time when the action plot of the story picks up.  Then the novel turns into a horror thriller that had me pausing from my reading at every thump in the night and had me putting my book down to pad around the house, double checking the doors and peeking in my son's room.  It's genuinely scary and on occasion a bit too graphic for my delicate, little stomach.  But even then, it's still gorgeous (heh.  "gore"geous) and the themes of protecting children and identifying monsters, of sacrificing a few to save many, and the morally gray characters made it powerful.

I didn't like the poor lab safety.  I did like that they never used the word "zombie."

***

Next week: Caraval, atmospheric mind games by Stephanie Garber.