M. R. Carey

NOT EVERY GIFT IS A BLESSING 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 is a very special girl. Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will read this year. 'Original, thrilling and powerful' - GUARDIAN 'Haunting, heartbreaking' - VOGUE 'A great read that takes hold of you and doesn´t let go' - John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN 'Scary, tense and fast-paced . . . but with a heart-warming tenderness' - MARIE CLAIRE

The Girl with All the Gifts

Absolutely fantastic, the characters are complex and the overall story/ideas are perfect

Joe Mccaffery 

[SPOILER] despite my love for fungus, i'm not really frantic about reading the same thing twice. sayang sih, i would rather keep the excitement for the better made story, this one. hah i wish i could buy a brain that hasn't read spora. the first surprise was very important, beneran, khususnya untuk kaum yang bergelut di bidang ini, terutama karena sebelumnya konsep zombie belum pernah dengan begitu masuk akalnya dikonstruksi. atau udah? well, this is my first zombie novel and i'm both proud and astonished with this innovation. i especially love how it was so well researched, and how everything was so elegantly crafted towards that particular conclusion, betapapun ironis dan tragisnya. it was a good ending. bahagia selamanya itu pilihan yang malas, ini lebih masuk akal.
penokohan juga dilakukan penulis dengan baik. you know it was when you become this invested in most of the characters, or all of them, for me in this case. the characters actually developed and despite their differences, they were all understandable. what they did was always just the most reasonable thing for the given situasion, such that even the characters you might found despicable died a seemingly dignified and honorable death. 
on a lighter note, i do hope that melanie's character got a little bit more explored, but, yeah, this is good enough. 
one of the best part of the dish, ga ada yang menggantung. it is so well wrapped up i can only think about the book's good sides, right now, bener-bener dah. 
well, there are so many things to love from this book. do yourself a favor and find out :)

Tobias V. Langhoff

Great premise and beginning, mediocre familiar zombie thriller-filler middle, great ending.

y✦

✦ kid zombies exhibiting real human behavior, intelligence, and feelings?? 
✦ didn't sign up for this cryfest
✦ dialogue: ❤️‍🩹/10 (melanie my lil meow meow)
✦ "ur my bread" *cue floodgates*
✦ extremely fast-paced, it was hard to put the book down

NOT EVERY GIFT IS A BLESSING. 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 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. The Girl With All the Gifts is a groundbreaking thriller, emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end.

The Girl With All the Gifts

jess larry

was a nice book, felt really immersive

a lot of morally grey situations that made me ponder a lot about what i would do so j'étais à leur place

basically a good general fiction/sf(ig) book, haven't read one of these in a while & it was a nice experience. you know these books that just make you feel like you're watching a movie ? yeah

liked the way the narration was written too, & how the tone seemed to change selon les personnages

Melissa Palmer

Book #107 Read in 2016
The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

This is a different kind of zombie book. Melanie is on a military base school, where the students are brought into their classroom by soldiers and are strapped into their chairs. They are hungries (zombies). But Melanie is a different type of zombie and doesn't want to eat her teacher Ms. Justineau, of whom she is very fond. This book started slowly for me but was worth it in the end. I enjoyed it.

Wilde

Went into this not knowing what to expect (it's my work's first book club book) and wasn't expecting it to be quite so harrowing and heartbreaking. Particularly poignant reading the first section during the time the news of the US child detention centres (concentration camps) broke. Hard not to see the parallels in how the children are treated.

This takes a fairly worn trope and spins it in a really interesting way. Just wish the ending wasn't so abrupt.

Wynter

Just in time for Halloween I came across The Girl with all the Gifts. It has been popping up on my periphery here and there for some time, but only last week something grabbed my attention in its cryptic premise.

The moment I opened up the first chapter I was glued to its pages. I think I haven’t been so enamored by a book’s opening in a long time. I couldn’t wait to see where it went. Carey did a great job at choosing his primary narrator to be a young girl, whose sole existence was rooted to her cell and a classroom. As she began to slowly learn about her surroundings, so did the plot unfold in front of us. These half-shrouded descriptions of her daily life got me on the edge of my seat to find out what was going on in this world.

At one point, about a third through... [more on Chaika Books]

Colleen

3.5 Stars
 
It’s a bit hard to describe The Girl With All the Gifts. Set in the near future in post-appocolyptic England, it had to do with zombies and the Greek myth of Pandora which is certainly a weird and unique combination. (I don’t think the zombie thing is a spoiler at this point; a quick glance through Goodreads will give that away.) It was a combination that certainly intrigued me. It is not quite your average zombie story. I'm not sure if I would truly call it a retelling, but the myth of Pandora ties heavily into this story and there was a lot of symbolism.


  “And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”

And for me, The Girl with All the Gifts was both. There were some things I really enjoyed and others that were just ok.
 
The story starts out so atmospheric. It’s such a simple thing: a girl describing her daily routine and her classes. Yet the air that something much darker is going on becomes more and more oppressive. Just enough to send a little shiver down my arms and certainly enough to keep me turning the pages.
 
At first Melanie is the only narrator, but after a little while a couple of other narrators are added in. These make up almost the entire cast. The rest of the characters are only briefly mentioned. As the other viewpoints are added in, you are given more idea of what is really going on in this post-apocalyptic world.


  “When your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”

Another interesting aspect was that the “plague” was caused by fungal spores. I thought the medical explanation was believable enough. And it was nice to have something other than your average bioplague. 
 
The second half of book was much more action-oriented. Which was ok, but it completely lost the atmospheric feeling of the first half of the book and felt more like your standard zombie action book/film. Also, in order to hide a plot twist, the narrative becomes less introspective and focused the actions of the characters rather than their thoughts. I understand why the author did it, but I did find it increasingly annoying how locked out I felt in the last quarter of the book. And as if being blocked from the characters’ thoughts was not bad enough, the author started that awful gimmick where characters figure everything out and/or see pivotal, shocking things but don’t tell you about! Those surprise reveals turned out to be anticlimactic when I did finally discover them. I would much rather have experienced them with the characters than be told in an offhand and emotionless way later on.
 
Which brings me to the ending. I have extremely mixed feelings about how the story ended. On the one hand, the symbolism and the ties to mythology were awesome. On the other hand, there were many gimmicky aspects to it, and it felt very Hollywood. I would have felt more lenient towards it if the last quarter of the book had not frustrated me so much. I went back and forth on where to round up or down for my rating. But since I liked the beginning of the story much more than the ending, I’m going to round down to three stars. The Girl with all the Gifts is still a decent read especially if you like zombie stories. But I am not sure whether or not I will read the sequel.


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 4 Stars
Writing Style: 3 Stars
Characters and Character Development: 3 Stars
Plot Structure and Development: 3 Stars
Level of Captivation: 4 Stars
Originality: 4 Stars

Sade A

And the end I heaved a big sigh because this end was bittersweet. I suppose it couldn't have been any other way. 

Ok so most of the Cons of this book had to do with Caldwell's part simply because there was a lot of scientific jargon there that I couldn't keep up with. Also it was unclear in the end how Melanie mastered her hunger impulses. I mean parks, Helen were virtually running around without e-blocs at the end, why wasn't she affected? 

Other than that, it was a really great book. I loved that we got to see everyone's perspectives. There's no clear winner here. Just one messed up world.. Great book!! I'd definitely read more books from this author

Jessica Ford

I really enjoyed this book. It was definitely a page turner. I couldn't help but love all of the characters except the doctor, who wasn't meant to be liked. It had a strange ending, but I guess it fit with the story. I don't know how else it could have ended.

Ryan LaFerney

The Girl With All the Gifts proves that the zombie trope has not been completely exhausted. MJ Carey has written as original, thrilling and powerful a novel as anything I've read in a long time. One that is warm, and yet very terrifying. I'm sad that I haven't read this book sooner.

Melanie is a little girl who goes to school, has friends, loves books. She is incredibly intelligent, and, we discover, lives underground in an army base with 20 or so other children her age. She is muzzled occasionally, and chained to her desk; and all the classes are tests, to see what information the children retain and understand. But she is a normal child, right up until the moment she smells human flesh too closely – and turns into a feral monster. Melanie, like the other children she lives with, is a zombie (or hungries as they are known in the book); the planet has been overrun, and these intelligent kids are the only possible way for its remaining scientists to find a cure. What's the cause of this infection? A mutation of the cordyceps fungus, the real-world parasitic mind-controlling fungus that essentially turns ants into zombies, has resulted in the widespread infection and zombification of the world's human population.

We see this world not only through Melanie's eyes, but also those of Miss Justineau, her favorite teacher. There's Sergeant Parks, the man in charge of the base, and Caroline Caldwell, the scientist who wants to open up Melanie's skull to find out why she's so intelligent when the rest of the zombie population is of the standard droolingly mindless variety.

So when the army base is attacked, these characters team up and attempt to survive together. But personalities and beliefs clash as Caldwell is so eager to cut up Melanie and Miss Justineau desires to keep Melanie safe to redeem the trauma of her past.

 The Girl With All The Gifts asks the question "How far would you go to save the world?" and the answers given by the characters are wide, varied, ethical and often, unethical.

The Girl With All The Gifts is a thought-provoking, tender, terrifying novel full of well-drawn characters. It's a parental love story – about a child deprived of parents and an adult who wishes to fulfill that role, and how they go about learning to trust each other in the midst of the zombie apocalypse.

Janice Hopper

A very readable book. The story carries you along briskly. Melanie, the little girl in the wheelchair in the blurb, is an interesting character, a true Pandora figure. 

The characters are ok, though a little "stick". There's the mother figure, the red shirt, the one we're supposed to hate, and the stalwart defender. (They're a bit more nuanced than my descriptions.) They're set on a journey that leads them to a grim discovery that makes the ending rather bleak, though logical. 

I just wish I was as sanguine about the future of this world as Melanie is at the end.

One of my favorites in the zombie genre. It has similar vibes as The Last of Us as well. 

I thought that the story was well written as it maintains a pretty tight story. I also really like our main lead in Melanie who I think is well written and believable. The story has a few different POV characters with my favorite being that of Melanie and Dr. Caldwell. I think they were the two best characters, with the others still being solid but not as compelling. 

A good mix of heart, violence, and intrigue. Would recommend!

One of my favorites in the zombie genre. It has similar vibes as The Last of Us as well. 

I thought that the story was well written as it maintains a pretty tight story. I also really like our main lead in Melanie who I think is well written and believable. The story has a few different POV characters with my favorite being that of Melanie and Dr. Caldwell. I think they were the two best characters, with the others still being solid but not as compelling. 

A good mix of heart, violence, and intrigue. Would recommend!

4.5 Stars. This was SUCH an entertaining read... I was slightly wary to read this because of the "zombie apocalypse" premise, but I was definitely not disappointed. The Girl With All The Gifts had me captivated from the first page to the last. Even through all the intellectual science-talk, which would typically bore me, I was intrigued and eager to learn more. I look forward to reading The Boy on the Bridge!

Todd Luallen

I misunderstood the blurb for this book and thought this story was entirely different. I think the reveal of what this story is actually about, was part of the enjoyment. I also think the marketing for this book was intentionally vague, and that was a good choice. Well done.

Kelsey Lynn

This was a suprise for me. I was in the mood for an easy entertaining read, preferably of the pandemic variety. This came up on a list and while I'm not really into zombies the description was fascinating, and seemed promising.
 The story is set up to follow Melanie, a younger girl who lives in a cell on a compound, who is strapped into a wheel chair everyday and rolled to class everyday by men with guns with her classmates. 
 I was hoping for a depressingly bleak story of a girl coming to terms with what she is and accepting or knowing that her only outcome is dissection. Weird but I love stuff like that. It wasn't like that at all, and my disappointment in the quick change of plot and scenery was quickly squashed by this just being a good story. 
 It follows Melanie, her favorite teacher, a doctor trying to find a cure and two soldiers as they have to fend for themselves and attempt to survive long enough to find Beacon, one of the only surviving human outposts after the breakdown nearly 20 years ago.

It was a well balanced, exciting read, the author is famous for comics and I feel he translated this to his novel by not having extras. Everything was to the point and had a purpose. Also the book was bleak enough for me too. 
 The only problems I had with this were at times Melanie ' s character was weak, and sometimes I forgot she was there. I wanted her utilized more. Also, if you've ever played the game The Last of Us, this was very similar in feel, plot-ish and even type of zombie. I overlooked it because I loved the game, but I feel the author may have been a little too influenced, and this book came out exactly 6 months after the game... soo a little close in proximity to claim no influence. 

However, overlooking that, I loved it, I read it as if I was a 'hungry' and it was a human. I'm happy that it's a stand alone book, too many trilogies these days. However I look forward to reading the original short story the author wrote and expanded into this (still after the Last of Us...) and I look forward to the movie adaptation, even though the casting is already terrible.

Nicole Dykeman

I really liked this one. I'm not usually one for a zombie-esque novel like this one is, but it was very compelling and I fell in love with all of the characters. They were quirky and lovable and tragic, and it made the whole book feel very real. The entire plot and concept was incredibly well planned out, but I'm not really sure how I feel about the ending. It ties everything together nicely, but it leaves a lot of questions. But then again, that's what a book should do, isn't it?

Catarina Silva

4 stars
That was such a solid post-apocalyptic/zombie book. Loved all the science talk, and the ending as well, very different from what I was expecting but made a lot of sense.

Bambi Ard

"The Girl with All the Gifts" is an incredibly unique take on the Zombie Apocalypse genre, and an incredible story besides. The plot is akin to a yarn ball, slowly unraveling from the first to last page, which inch by inch exposes more revelations, more truths, more pieces of a puzzle that eventually slot together for an amazing conclusion. 

Many of the things we see in this book are familiar from pre-existing zombie media, but there are several elements that, to me at least, are either unique, or done in such a fresh way that it feels unique. There was one revelation right near the end, the revelation that had been buried in the center of the yarn ball, that truly shocked me, and I love being surprised by books.

The cast is great as well: every character felt real and human, fully fleshed out (no pun intended...) and realistically flawed. They had strong, distinguished personalities, with things both to love and hate about them (Well, except for Caldwell. I've nothing but contempt for Caldwell.)

The ending left me breathless, thrilled, and satisfied. It was one of those endings that you can't exactly describe as "happy" or "good" but feels so right for the story that you won't accept anything else.

A new favorite of mine, and an easy five stars.

'ORIGINAL, THRILLING AND POWERFUL' - Guardian 'HAUNTING, HEARTHBREAKING' - Vogue The phenomenal word-of-mouth bestseller that is now a BAFTA Award-nominated movie NOT EVERY GIFT IS A BLESSING 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 is a very special girl. Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will read this year. 'A great read that takes hold of you and doesn ́t let go' - John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN *Return to the world of THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS in M. R. Carey's stunning new novel THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE - out now!*

The most original thriller you will read this year

The Girl With All The Gifts

Lauren Tabor

*2.25

I did not enjoy this book. It was really slow and boring and just the story line for me was uninteresting. The premise of this sounded amazing so I had high hopes going into this one. I wanted to quit reading this so many times but I kept holding out that it would get better, but for me it never did. It was a very unsatisfying read for me and was in no way a thriller.

Rhiannon Jerrom

Excellent book, a very good story and very well written. I truly struggled to put this book down. Definitely a five star read and I will be recommending it to everyone I know who like dystopian, thriller, horror novels.

Kelsey Lucero

It was good for what it is. It isn't my genre at all though and not a book I would reread.

Sarah Vaughan

I'm not usually a fan of science fiction, but I couldn't put this book down.

The Girl with All the Gifts

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