The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

Disclaimer: I received this book as an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

Rating: 4.5/5 stars


This book had me hooked and obsessed all weekend long. From the very beginning on Friday evening through both of my daughter's nap times Saturday and Sunday and late late late Sunday night (and maybe a little early early early Monday morning) to finish. It is the story of one girl, two women, and two men and their attempt at survival in a scary post-apocalyptic world, and it is engrossing to say the least!

It starts from the perspective of a young, smart, and inquisitive girl named Melanie obsessed with Greek mythology who truly loves one of her teachers. Normal enough, right? Oh, yeah -- and she is also living in a cell in an underground bunker on a military base where she needs to be strapped into a wheelchair at gunpoint by soldiers before she can leave the cell. 

In this book, Carey weaves a story that gives the reader an incomplete picture of the world that slowly gets larger and larger in scope. I found that the story at times is so well paced and visually striking that it reads like a movie, so it was really no surprise to me to find out that there is a film adaptation in the works. 

I appreciated how well Carey was able to get in the head of a little girl (and each of the women and men). Each perspective is complete and different, almost every crisis was not foreseen by the reader, and I delighted in each surprise (although there was a scene that had me hugging and apologizing to my cat Sam, who had curled up beside me on the couch). By the end I couldn't have fallen asleep without finishing this book -- even if I had wanted to.

I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates an intimate look at human survival after great disaster. There are scary and graphic bits, but overall I thought this book's success was in the depiction of ordinary people who don't know enough -- which made it all the scarier! 

If you read Cronin's The Passage and are looking for something in the same vein to read before he comes out with the third installment -- this book fits the bill! 

Favorite lines: 

Pandora [...] was a really amazing woman. All the gods had blessed her and given her gifts. That’s what her name means—’the girl with all the gifts’. So she was clever, brave, and beautiful, and funny, and everything else you’d want to be. But she just had the one tiny fault, which was that she was very—and I mean very—curious.

Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether hwat's inside is good or bad. Because it's both. Everything is always both. [...] But you have to open it to find that out.