THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS: Prepare Your Brain to Get Drop Kicked

The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey
~post by Sarah H.

With all the post-apocalyptic fiction coming out these days, it’s hard to know which of them should make it on to your reading list this summer. The Girl With All The Gifts has so much more to offer than being just a top-notch post-apocalypse novel. A little bit horror, a little bit sci-fi, and a little bit coming-of-age, The Girl With All The Gifts turns out to equal more than the sum of its parts.

In deciding to read The Girl With All the Gifts, it would be enough for me to know that author M.R. Carey’s (also known as Mike Carey) run of the Vertigo title Hellblazer (also known as the source material for the film and soon to be NBC series Constantine) was only exceeded in length by the legendary Garth Ennis. But when you add to that his long time contribution to Marvel’s X-Men: Legacy and collaboration with Neil Gaiman in The Sandman Presents, the question changes from “will this be a good book,” to the question of “how fast can I devour this good story?”

The answer is pretty darn fast! The only thing that compelled me to put this book down was an overwhelming need to eat and sleep. Carey has created such an interesting vision of what the future could look like post pandemic-style-catastrophe, and then populated that vision with a cast driven by sincere and deeply held ideals that quite often conflict with one another. The story centers on Melanie, a ten year old student amid a group of students who are imprisoned in a military base just north of London. Why they are imprisoned and what their imprisonment entails is a mystery that unfolds through multiple viewpoints of multiple characters, which change each chapter. It’s a technique that immediately piques one’s curiosity while simultaneously making you relate to each person’s point of view.

In this crazy end-of-the-human-race scenario, Carey has skillfully created a world where every character’s noble thoughts or attempts to live up to their pre-catastrophe ethics are faced with the problem of the very survival of the human race.  Melanie’s teacher, Miss Justineau, has our immediately sympathy, but there is a sense that she may be naïve about her part in all this. The terse and methodical Dr. Caldwell has our immediate ire, but as her motivations become clearer and the situation revealed to be more dire than anyone previously imagined, it makes sense to re-evaluate one’s feelings about her as well.

I hesitate to say any more about the plot since going in cold will make the novel all that much more enjoyable. I’ll just warn you this, once things get moving, the story advances at a break-neck pace to the finish line. You might read this book so fast you’ll get whiplash, so breathe, do a little yoga and prepare your brain to get drop kicked into the most terrifying London you’ve ever imagined. But also remember, hope is always on the horizon.

Copies of The Girl With All the Gifts are currently available on our shelves and via bookpeople.com