The Girl with All the Gifts

Synopsis: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.

Summary:

Definitely not your typical zombie novel, The Girl with All the Gifts redefines the apocalypse genre with a refreshing twist that is almost as juicy as brains.

My thoughts:

The Girl with All the Gifts is staggeringly difficult to review because it is one of those stories that is best enjoyed if you know absolutely nothing about it. If you are planning on reading this in the near future I would advise you to leave this review purely so you can have the full effect!

The plot isn’t difficult to grasp, but it is incredibly far from the usual tarnished brush that all zombie apocalypse novels are painted with nowadays. The story begins withMelanie, a young girl who has spent much of her life split between school and her cell. Her cell is her hell but the school is her redemption. Especially when it’s a Miss. Justineau day. Miss. Justineau teaches Melanie and all the other children things that they never knew – facts about animals, plants, towns, maths. And sometimes she even read them stories. That was always Melanie’s favourite.

It is interesting to see this vision of a fragmented world slowly build up from the perspective of this young girl, a world which she herself knows very little about and only begins to understand the extent of the Breakdown and the Hungries(as the infected are known) through the reserved insight of Miss Justneau, her own recollection of the outside world a distant memory.

Her fellow classmates come and go, never to return, with no explanation or even acknowledgement from the teachers. Until the day comes for Melanie to be taken. Strapped to her chair once again, she is led to the myserious door at the end of the corridor and is slowly wheeled up, up, up, and across the open air of the main base headed towards the lab.

Through a drastic turn of events, Miss Justineau attempts to save Melanie from her fate but is cut short. The base is under fire. The Hungries and Junkers, people living outside the safe cities, working together in a never before seen attack.
The breach in security forces Melanie to fight for her life and flee the world she has come to know with the only person whom she trusts and loves, Miss Justineau and a few other begrudging members of the base namely Sergeant Parks, the soldier who was head of operations and Dr. Caldwell, the doctor who had Melanie on the dissection table…
It doesn’t take long for Melanie to discover the truth of what she really is, the gift that she possesses and the fact that it wants her to share her gift with the world.

The story is brilliant at highlighting the straining human relationships in the post apocalyptic world from the soldiers trying to keep their shit together and Caldwell in particular striving to be the savior of humanity to the Junkers embracing the sudden paradigm shift and adapting to the new world. But it’s also refreshing to see a different point of view on the Hungries and their varying behavioral differences, an interesting change to the usual mindless zombies we see in other novels of the genre. Even more intriguing is the cause behind the Hungry phenomenon. A cause which exists in the real world today and would only need to create a strain to infiltrate the human body to sweep across the world. just let that sink in.

The defining subplot of this story for me has to be the relationship between Melanieand the humans. Despite their obvious differences, Melanie finds solace in Miss Justineau, the one person that trusts her and loves her despite what she is and what shes done and she makes it her mission to protect her like the heroes in the stories she’d read. Sergeant Parks is at first apprehensive, their interaction going against every protocol that had been drilled into him but he eventually grows to like Melanie even if he still keeps his guard up. But Dr. Caldwell was the Judas of this story. She had good intentions but on the surface it was clear to see that humanity and thehungries was too far gone yet she persisted in her obligation to rescue humanity. Even if that meant cutting up children.

But the heart rendering finish is truly spectacular and will leave you incredibly numb.

Final Word:

A zombie refresh worth more than its salt. Deserved of the praise it has received thus far, it’s no surprise that Hollywood has jumped on this gem(set to be released next year)  and I can’t wait to see this world humbling story brought to the big screen.