Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to get pretty excited about the things I’m passionate about and tend to throw myself into them 100%. So when I was doing research one evening for a book club to join and came across the horror book club, Reader Beware!, at Left Bank Books, I was hooked! But then I saw the catch…I only had a little over a week to purchase and read the 403 page book that was the selection for December, The Girl with All the Gifts. Easy peasy, I thought, I’ve got this in the bag, sort of.
And actually because the book is pretty fast paced, and full of short, one or two page chapters, I made it all the way to the last 20 pages before the night of the book club, which I’m definitely proud of. I eventually finished the last 20 pages when I got home that night – even though I had skimmed them before the book club, just so I would know how it was all going to turn out.
Ok, so, what’s the book about? Glad you asked! I had no clue what to expect from this book when I ordered it, Even the blurb on the back of the book doesn’t tell you much other than the fact that the main character, Melanie, is woken up from her cell every morning by a man named Sergeant Parks who, at gun point, and with the help of two other men, strap her into her wheelchair and take her to class. Ok, so at this point, it could be about pretty much anything. I’ll be honest, when I first read that, and even the first several chapters of the novel, I was pretty convinced that I was reading about a psychopath who’s keeping children captive…which isn’t exactly that far off track.
But before I go any further:
Did you see that? Do you know what that means? The next things I’ll be talking about are major SPOILERS for the book. While knowing about them before reading the book doesn’t really spoil the plot, and you do find out the spoilers pretty early on, there’s something about the magic of not knowing until the author decides you should know that I’m trying to help you preserve if you want to.
Anyway, ok, hopefully if you’ve made it this far, you either don’t care or are just accepting the repercussions of knowing the spoilers.
All right, back to the plot, So Melanie and her classmates, who live their entire lives shuttled back and forth between their classroom and their cells, with a single weekly shower and bowl of food, are, in fact, zombies, which in the book they are called hungries. Apparently there is a really, real fungus that attacks insects and spiders by mimicking their neurotransmitters and invading their brain, Eventually the fungi will take control of the poor host insect or spider and cause it to find the highest leaf or branch it can and release more of the fungi into the air to infect other insects and spiders, killing the host but keeping the cycle going. Well in the novel, apparently this fungi has mutated and can now also infect humans, thus the hungries have emerged in the world of the novel.
Most of the hungries in the novel are your typical, moldy, running type zombies from any horror flick. But what makes Melanie, and her classmates, unique is that while she has been infected with the fungi, she has still maintained her personality and her genius level IQ.
With that massive spoiler out of the way, I’ll stop the summary there because even though finding out about the hungries is a major turning point in the novel, there are so many more twists and turns that even though I thought I did a pretty good job skimming the last few pages before the book club, when I came back and actually read them, I walked away with a whole new perspective on the book.
So since this book isn’t technically part of the Books of One Stack project, I won’t rate it with books, but rather, a cute little skeleton thumbs up graphic I found. And out of five possible skeleton thumbs ups, I give this book a four. One point each for imagination, fast paced tempo but not bad or simple writing, insight into humanity and excellent reworking of an often exploited genre. The only reason I refrained from the full five thumbs ups, is because I, personally, do not like post-apocalyptic novels or movies because there is usually no hope left at the end of the story, And when reading this novel, I had my hopes up that there would some hope for humanity there, but well, let’s just say it only further strengthened my hypothesis that post-apocalyptic things = bad news for humanity about 99.9% of the time.
The Books of One Stack 