Book Review: The Girl With All The Gifts

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey

I was at the airport one day and wanted to take something to read on the plane so I searched for a book of fantasy story and this yellow book caught my eyes, “The Girl With All The Gifts”. I imagined it to be about a girl with all the superpowers. I picked it up to read the back, it read…

NOT EVERY GIFT IS A BLESSING.

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.

The Girl With All the Gifts is a groundbreaking thriller, emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end.

 

It gave me a chill up the spine and quickly put it back on the shelf. I walked out of the bookstore without buying a book, but I was tempted to get that yellow book so I bought it through Kindle app, downloaded and began to read. The result is a story that makes your brain feel at least a little nibbled on but you keep on wondering what’s so special about this girl and you can’t stop. Carey does a fantastic job of building up the mystery of exactly what Melanie is, and why she’s treated like a vicious creature as well as a gifted child. If you go in to this novel cold, you’ll be utterly amazed.

I really don’t want to give away much about the book — it’s such a clever, surprising ride, you’re better off discovering it for yourself. But here’s the basic set-up: a group of kids are being taught in a very special school, where they learn about Greek myths and literature from a group of teachers, including the kind and beautiful Miss Justineau. But when they’re not being given a classical education, these children are herded into cells by a group of soldiers, who treat them like wild animals. And occasionally, one of the kids is taken away to a laboratory to be dissected by the cruel scientist Caroline Caldwell.

The smartest of these kids is Melanie, whose imagination fixates on the myths she reads about and whose mind is constantly going in romantic directions. She has a doomed hopeless crush on her wonderful teacher Miss Justineau, who in turn is trying very hard to keep Melanie from being the next child marked for dissection in Dr. Caldwell’s lab. But the things that Melanie doesn’t know about the world outside her little school will soon shatter her romantic notions forever.

So without going too much into spoilers, let’s just talk in some generalities about why this novel is so great — a huge part of it is that the characters and their emotions feel utterly real, and Carey has captured something sweet and terrible about a student having a platonic crush on a teacher. Melanie’s feelings about Miss Justineau are both overblown and completely relatable, and over time you realize that Miss Justineau is aware of Melanie’s love for her and trying her best not to crush it. Miss Justineau, meanwhile, is somewhat cynical and self-loathing, even though she also cares desperately about her very special students.