The Girl With All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)
by M. R. Carey

Zombies are so hot right now. The Walking Dead, World War Z, Warm Bodies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - even Game of Thrones has been bringing out its undead of late. With so many zombies around, it's getting more and more difficult to find any kind of unique spin on the idea and it's always pleasantly surprising to come across something a bit different.
The Girl With All the Gifts is a zombie book, but it's also much more than that.

Everybody loves a zombie.

The story follows Melanie, an intelligent and curious 10-year-old who attends school in an underground bunker, strapped to her chair and watched over by armed guards.
For Melanie, life is pretty straightforward. She loves stories from Greek mythology and she loves Miss Justineau, the teacher who introduced her to the stories. She wishes her name was Pandora (the "Girl with all the gifts" of the title) and hopes to one day see the big city of Beacon.  
Melanie and her classmates are a lot like normal children, but there's also something very sinister going on behind the scenes - the adults of Melanie's world may hold all of the power, but they're clearly afraid of the children in their care and it doesn't look like Melanie will make it to Beacon any time soon.

It's no major spoiler to say that there are zombies in this book. The Girl With All the Gifts may be a zombie story, but it's not about zombies. It's about people and relationships - particularly the unique relationships between children and parents, and the bonds that form between very different people when they're thrown into a life-threatening situation together. It's about the way that humans cope with challenges and the way that we try to understand obstacles by dissecting and studying them. At it's heart, it's a story about humanity and how we define it - these are some pretty complex themes for a zombie story.

Melanie is a fabulous character and her smart-but-naive narration keeps things interesting as she doesn't always understand everything that happens around her. She's precocious and thick-skinned but also desperately lonely and so easy to feel for. The supporting cast of characters is equally interesting - the sweet but conflicted Miss Justineau, the aggressive scientist Caroline Caldwell (with her unshakeable belief that she'll find a cure for the apocalypse under her microscope), the exhausted man-in-charge Sergeant Parks - these are all well-developed characters who feel like real people with real back stories and understandable motivations. All of the characters continue to develop throughout the story, and none more so than Melanie as she comes to understand who she is and what's happening in the world around her.

Pandora's Box - do you really want to know what's in there?

It's a gripping, fast-moving and very readable story and it brings something special to the well-worn world of zombie fiction. While the plotline itself is not particularly revolutionary (there are some people being chased by zombies. Run, people! The zombies will eat your brains!), M. R. Carey has created a unique world peopled by fascinating, three-dimensional characters dealing with deeper questions than those usually posed in a run-from-the-zombies horror novel. He also has a bit of a gift himself, when it comes to putting words together in a very effective way - for example, "you can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them" or "No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure".

It's not really a book about zombies at all. It's a fantastic novel, which just happens to have a few zombies in it.

9/10