The Girl With All The Gifts

The Girl With All The Gifts is a book about the end of the world. In it, a girl named Melanie is kept in a bunker, underground, sealed off from everyone else. Everyone always treats her as if she's extremely dangerous, along with the someteen other kids who share the bunker wit her. I'm not entirely sure how much I should spoil, because there is a nice little mystery through the first part of the book. One thing I will say is: it's totally zombies.

But then, after the mystery is all worked out, the compound is attacked. Melanie escapes, along with a ragtag group of individuals (I don't want to spoil who), and they all have to make it back to Beacon City, the last human stronghold in all of Great Britain. Along the way, they will have to survive bandits, come to uneasy agreements with each other, and not be eaten by zombies.

The zombies, by the way, are definitely a strong point in The Girl With All The Gifts. They are a variation of the cordyceps fungus (think The Last of Us) which essentially just means, "hey, this is technically possible, and therefore better than those other zombies!"* The zombies (which are called "hungries" by the cast) are thin and pale, and they spend most of their time stock-still. However, as soon as they hear a noise, they snap to attention and run towards it. If a hungry smells a human, it also immediately enters its rage state and runs towards it. This is actually a really clever idea, and it leads to the haunting image of a garden of pale figures, staying perfectly still.

There are, however, complications. There are other rules to the zombies which are revealed along the way, and they... well, honestly, they make absolutely no sense. Some of them, at least. This is the problem I have with the book: plot holes. So many plot holes. None of them are game-breaking, but they are certainly there. For someone as plot-driven as I am, this is a serious problem. I like picking apart exactly why and how things happen; it's one of the reasons I love time-travel stories so much. However, there are just too many things to pick at, here.

That's why, originally, I didn't want to write this. I don't like writing negative reviews. If I read a book and don't like it, I usually will just skip over it. However, this book has all of the things I like. An interesting premise. A hostile environment. Half-believable pseudoscience. Excellent characters. Objectively, this is a good book. But I didn't like it.

So, here's my conclusion: If you like zombies, or children, or adventure, or suspense, or mystery, or heartbreak, and you do not care at all about plot holes (or are not good at spotting them), then you should read this book.


*Really, though, there aren't any realistic zombies, just zombies that are slightly less impossible. The cordyceps fungus affects insects and arthropods, things with skeletons. They breathe through their skin. Humans don't. Also, the cordyceps fungus does not make an organism rant to attack or eat its own kind. That would be wildly inefficient. Instead, the fungus just makes it infiltrate its hive area and try to get into a good vantage point to spread its spores. I don't know of anything that deliberately makes an animal attack another animal. Even rabies just makes the animals angry, aggressive, and confused; as opposed to bloodthirsty. I think 28 Days Later's "rage virus" is the most semi-realistic zombie I've seen. Although the Brooks Zombies will always be the best ones.

tl;dr: Ain't no realistic zombies. Using an actual organism only helps with appearances. If you want a good, realistic interpretation of human cordyceps, take a few minutes to read Up, by Josef K. It's real short.