The Girl with All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

SPOILERS AHEAD!

I really enjoyed this one - it was a great mix of action, adventure, mystery, and thoughtfulness. It's obvious to us as readers pretty much from the start what Melanie is, and it's fascinating that it takes her so long to recognize it herself. Maybe it's because, although she's extremely smart, she only knows what she's been taught. She's been told for years that she's a little girl, and so she believes that. She knows what a hungry is intellectually, but doesn't really she IS one until she truly feels the hunger. Once she realizes the danger she poses, she is the first one to suggest extra precautions to protect against her.

I love her relationship with Helen Justinbeau. It wasn't her intelligence that won Helen over, it was her obvious love and clear emotions. Those 2 were so devoted to each other, and I loved how they protected and helped one another.

Parks was an interesting guy - in many ways, he was just doing what he was taught, trying to keep as many people safe as he could. As he spent more time in proximity with Melanie, he was slowly won over by both her humanity and her obvious intelligence, and started to trust her more and more.

Dr. Cauldwell was so frustrating. On the one hand, her research was vital to figuring out how the hungry disease was spread and what the next step was. Without her findings, Melanie wouldn't have known what to do to help reboot the world, so to speak. To Dr. Cauldwell, the cost was worth it. But is the cost ever worth it when innocents are experimented on and killed in the name of progress, in the name of science? It sounds a lot like what the Nazi doctors did in WW2, what early researchers did across the world while conducting illegal research on uninformed and thus non-consenting human subjects.

I did appreciate how much the science made sense, the reasoning behind how and why Melanie and the other kids were different from the normal Hungries. I feel a little bad for the life Miss J will be leading from now on, but I think she will probably look on it as penance for the wrongs she committed, and as more and more hungry kids start awakening emotionally, she'll start to love them as much as she loves Melanie. Hopefully that's enough.

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