The Girl with All the Gifts

Interesting, evocative and quite scary!

Interesting, evocative and quite scary!

If someone had described this book to me i wouldn't have read it so i'm glad i had no idea what was coming as i couldn't put it down. I loved the characters and how they grew throughout to the end. I was always aware of the humanity in the situation and the warmness running through it even given the circumstances. Thoroughly thought provoking and heartbreaking.
Loved it!

** warning this post may contain spoilers**

We all felt that the book was written in a very cinematic way and we're at all surprised that the author wrote a screenplay for the book at the same time as writing the book. There certainly were a lot of highly dramatic and often gory parts to the book that we felt would work well on screen as well as they did in the book. This was also made clear by the fact that the book was written in the present tense but not in first person which made the book feel really fast paced.

This book is said to be about zombies but some of the book club didn't notice this at all, they didn't realise that the monsters in the book were zombies. We had a discussion about whether they were zombies or whether they were more like a vehicle for the fungus, we felt that as they didn't technically die until the fungus had completely taken them over that they maybe weren't zombies. This was also shown a bit by the fact that some of the zombie like characters seemed to retain some of their humanity especially the newly made zombies.

We felt that the author was sympathetic to the zombies rather than painting them all as monsters with no control which was a different way to go compared to the monster books of old. It was interesting to have a human painted as the monster rather than the zombies, although as we discussed the book we wondered whether we would be on the side of the human monster (Caldwell) or the softer outlook that Miss Justineaux portrayed. It seemed that the book was more about the relationships between the different characters rather than them just constantly trying to escape the zombies. We especially liked the relationship between Melanie and Miss Justineaux, this seemed to be the central point to most of the middle of the book.

We felt that the characters in the book were obviously tropes of traditional horror story books with the army types, the softer sympathetic character, the hard scientifically oriented character etc. but they were so well written that we didn't really care how obvious they all were.

There were a few interesting moral dilemmas within the book such as the one that Gallagher faces, we wondered if we would do the same as he did. We also discussed whether humans have a right to carry on existing and when would you give up the fight and realise that maybe it's the right thing for humans to no longer exist, at least in their current format. The ending of the book we felt was hopeful for planet earth, if not entirely for humankind.

Overall we gave this book 8 out of 10.

I first tried to read this book but gave up after about the fourth chapter as it was not making a lot of sense to me but having downloaded it from audible to listen to on my smart phone i am hooked. I do find that if i cannot engage with a book because it is a book club choice and not a genre i usually read to listen to someone reading it to me can often make a huge difference. When doing my O levels about 40 years ago !!! (that was a shocking thing to have to write) we had to study some sci fi short stories and were taught that for them to work for us we had to be able to 'suspend disbelief' I am able to do that with this book and i cannot wait for the ending, which i have no idea what to expect. Yes some bits are hard to follow and take some understanding the book is thirlling and holds your attention as you want to find out what happens to everyone and it is possible to create a real relationship with the characters and to get involved with how everyone interacts

The first hundred pages or so were very strong, introducing ideas without necessarily hitting the reader over the head with them. Reasonable characterisation overall, coupled with a strong ending to make this worth the time it takes to read. Unfortunately, the ending in particular was let down by increasingly obvious hints about what was going to happen. A decent book, but lets itself down after the setting changes.

I though that this book was okay but it was hard to keep up with what was happening. it is quite far fetched and unrealistic as it is a fiction book. I wouldn't recommend this book to someone else unless they enjoyed fantasy fiction about zombies.

we gave it 9.5/10
- fabulous
- couldn't out it down
- loved it, so easy to read
- didn't glorify the violence
- didn't dumb down the science, yet easy to understand
- excellent story/page turner

I wasn't expecting this book to turn into a zombie chase, but enjoyed the look at a ravaged English countryside. Not as scary as the quotes on the cover suggest- I believe the novel has just been nominated for a horror award- but gripping nonetheless. I would recommend it to fans of How I Live Now, also set in a militarised England, or fans of the 'science side' of the Walking Dead.