Looking for an “emotionally charged and gripping book from beginning to end?”
A month ago, if you asked me whether I liked post-apocalyptic zombie stories, my answer would have been, “Definitely not!” Then I read The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey (pub. 2014). This adult novel could easily be YA since it’s told mainly from the perspective of the ten-year old main character. The story gets more and more interesting as it progresses, and the ending blew me away.
Not every gift is a blessing. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks 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. Melanie is a very special girl. Amazon
Quotes from the book:
“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”
“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 what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.
But you have to open it to find that out.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”
“Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself — that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they’re something different than they are.” Goodreads.
Related Info:
Click here to see an interview with M.R.Carey on You Tube. A movie based on the book came out in 2017. A prequel titled, The Boy On The Bridge was published in 2017.
Have you read the book? Seen the movie? What did you think?
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