Hello Beautiful People! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey. This dystopian thriller revolves around a zombie-ish infection that takes over humanity, and how people come to understand it. I thought that the book had an interesting plot that was definitely unique in areas given how much the humans-eating humans story has been played out many times before.
Main Characters:
- Melanie: A young girl who is being held at a special military facility that is doing tests on children who seem to have adapted to the infection that is causing the rest of people to lust for blood and meat, finds herself having a special bond with a teacher that exceeds how other children are treated in the facility
- Helen Justineau: A ‘teacher’ at the facility who is there to teach the children things so that scientists can study their abilities, builds a special bond with Melanie and gets herself in trouble due to this many times
- Sergeant Eddie Parks: An officer at the facility who often interacts with the children, and has his humanity tested by them many times
- Dr. Caroline Caldwell: Is one of the head scientists at the facility, is convinced that the children aren’t really children and ultimately treats them as such, is obsessed with finding a cure for the infection and will stop at nothing to do so
My Review
Going into The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey I knew it had a dystopian theme to it but I really wasn’t aware at all of the plot or what the real focus of the book was. While the book definitely revolves around the plot of the infection taking over the world and turning the people who get it into bloodthirsty hosts, it really revolves around what humanity would do in a time of crisis, and what lengths people would go to to save themselves. With really interesting and dynamic characters, the different perspectives make the reader question who is really of the sanest mind in this world that feels so hopeless.
I gave The Girl with All the Gifts an 8.5/10 rating. I thought the book was a really interesting take on a well-done theme of an infection that causes people to desire to eat other people. With kids as the main characters, and Melanie at the heart of them it was hard to not quickly connect to the characters and want to continue following their story. Melanie is a curious and smart young girl who is being held and tested in a facility that is hoping to eventually find a cure for the infection that she and many others have. Melanie and her fellow classmates spend their time in classes that are specifically designed to test their abilities and how their bodies function while also being watched and tested on by scientists. While on the surface the testing seems innocent, especially to the children, it becomes clear quickly that it’s quite cruel. The cruelty of the facility tests the humanity of the different non-infected adults there, and when the facility is overrun it forces them to really see if the way they saw the world was right all along.
Through the perspective of Dr. Caldwell we see that she believes that once infected with the illness, the infection takes on the entire system. Something is different about the children that are in the facility, while being infected and only having a hunger for blood and fresh meat they are capable of talking and somewhat functioning like a non-infected person. She believes that whatever is up with the kids is making the infection take longer to overtake the system. She believes that ultimately they are already dead, but just something about them is special. If she can isolate it, she may be able to come up with a cure. Early on we can see that Dr. Caldwell functions on a bit of an obsessed bias and struggles to see outside of her beliefs. I struggled to see how she could view the children as dead when they were talking, were seemingly healthy, and were capable of doing things like learning and forming opinions. I understood that her belief was based on how infected people acted outside of the facility (are essentially zombies with minimal human functions) but I felt that something had to be different about the kids in another way, but in what I wasn’t sure.
We see early on that the kids must have been born into the infected world as the adults reference the uninfected past as some time ago, and one younger adult character doesn’t know a non-infected world at all. Caldwell feels there is something about them that is immune to the infection and will stop at nothing to figure out what exactly that is. As I said earlier, on the surface the testing seems nothing too intense, but it becomes clear to Melanie that something more sinister is going on when children go away and don’t come back. The children have minimal interaction with one another and are often strapped into chairs unable to move all day. They only interact in the classroom and even when they do officers and scientists on the base keep it very minimal. Melanie takes a strong liking to a teacher working at the facility named Helen Justineau, and through their interactions together Helen starts to question if these kids are really ‘dead’.
The book hits a climax when the facility is overrun with Junkers, a community of non-infected people who are often struggling to survive in the dystopian world, often ignored by the government. In an attempt to survive different characters are forced to see what they have been hiding from all that time in their big protected government world. I think the characters really make this book. If there weren’t strong characters, all of whom had different perspectives based on how they had experienced the world, it may not have been such an interesting book. I really enjoyed the relationship between Melanie and Helen. It was sweet to see Melanie get to live out her fantasy for small moments of being a real kid and being loved and cared for. Melanie just broke my heart in parts with how desperate she was to not be what people were telling her she was, which was a deadly monster. She wanted so badly to prove to the adults in the book that she was good and that she was willing to do whatever they wanted of her.
Overall a really interesting and fun read. It made for a really absorbing book with characters that pull you in, fast-paced action parts, and a riveting plot. I saw that there was a second book that focuses on the same time frame but on different people experiencing the dystopian world and I definitely want to check it out. I am curious to see if the characters play as big of a role in that one. If you’ve read The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey what did you think of it?
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to read any spoilers ***
I have to say I loved the way the book ended. I lowkey felt like it was so satisfying.
When Melanie, Helen, Parks, and Caldwell escape the facility together before Caldwell is to kill and dissect Melanie, they are exposed to the outside world in ways they weren’t before. Through their travels, Caldwell realizes that there isn’t a cure because the infection is supposed to be the new generation. She was wrong all along that the infection killed people, what it really did was infect so that the human body could evolve to it. She realizes that Melanie, and other kids her age were mostly likely born to infected parents (because it is airborne so really everyone is technically infected) meaning that they were born with an evolution of sorts to the infection and that their systems worked with it and not against it.
Caldwell realizes this after she becomes deathly infected herself. Adults infected in the way she is aren’t supposed to survive. The infection’s purpose is to infect adults through airborne methods so they have evolved children, and kill off everyone else who isn’t evolved. The children are the next generation and Caldwell has been killing them to learn about something she can’t ever actually fix. With Melanie and Helen being the only ones left, and having found a pack of ‘wild’ evolved children Helen starts to do what she does best, and starts to teach the children, to be children.
It ended in the way I wanted it to with Helen and Melanie getting their happily ever after together. They deserve it, and it was sweet to see that their love for one another would get to continue as time went on, and all of those who saw Melanie as nothing but a lab rat all died. I will say though that Park’s character development throughout the book did make me disappointed when he didn’t make it. At least he had come to realize though, by the time he died that there really wasn’t anything to be afraid of, it was just the world trying to reset itself.
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