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Jan. 12th, 2016 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI found The Girl With All The Gifts much more stressful to read than I expected! Kudos to M.R. Carey for writing a book compelling enough that it made me anxious on the protagonist's behalf all the way from Boston to Philadelphia.
The story starts out with a tight focus on Melanie, a bright little girl in a classroom in an experimental facility, and her bond with her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, who is the only one who treats the kids there like human beings as opposed to mysteriously and potentially dangerous monsters who need to be strapped into chairs when interacting with anybody else. Melanie is fine with most of this, since she doesn't really remember anything else, but she wishes non-classroom times weren't so boring and is mildly concerned about the occasions when other children disappear beyond the doors into the lab and don't come back.
Melanie is, of course, a feral zombie child! The book takes place post-zombie-apocalypse, and a research team is studying Melanie and the other zombie children, who appear to be the only zombies with brain functions left, in hopes of finding a cure.
The first part of the book, which sets up the whole weird dynamic of the School For Children Who Don't Overcome Cannibalistic Impulses Good And Want To Learn How To Do Other Stuff Good Too, was my favorite part of the book by far. The post-apocalyptic road trip that follows through most of the middle of the book is well-done and interesting as post-apocalyptic road trips go, but felt a bit more like a standard zombie novel and much less striking than the setup. I am much more stressed out by Authority Figures Betraying Small Children than by Random Zombie Attack #6.
As I said above, I found the book incredibly compelling, and I liked what Carey was trying to do with the ending, but in the post-book afterglow, I admit I have some unanswered questions.
- OK, a minor one, but: how old is Melanie supposed to be, anyway? Is it ever said? Does anyone know? Maybe it was stated early on, but I cannot for the life of me remember and it's bugging me
- speaking of, how old were all the feral zombie children when they were brought in? I would imagine that most of them missed out on some very important stages of early child development while wandering around in zombieland, so how is it that by the time we start the book, they are all communicating fluently in English and ready to learn advanced geometry?
- how the heck did Melanie convince the feral zombie tribe at the end, which she had just ATTACKED and whose leader she had just STRAIGHT-UP MURDERED, to sit down placidly for Lessons With Miss Justineau?
- and, once again: early child development! Several of the feral zombie children are in their preteens or so, if I remember right, and they are all described as nonverbal, so, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but is this not a little too late for solid language acquisition? It's a nice gesture to have Miss Justineau teach them all Greek mythology and ensure the survival of culture and civilization in a world ruled by our new zombie overlords, but ... I'm guessing Melanie might have better luck with the next generation of feral zombie children. JUST A THOUGHT.
- or else with her classmates? I'm extremely worried about Melanie's feral zombie classmates, who are, presumably, still all sitting in their cells at the end of the book, waiting for an authority figure to come back and let them out. Someone go help Melanie's classmates!
The story starts out with a tight focus on Melanie, a bright little girl in a classroom in an experimental facility, and her bond with her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, who is the only one who treats the kids there like human beings as opposed to mysteriously and potentially dangerous monsters who need to be strapped into chairs when interacting with anybody else. Melanie is fine with most of this, since she doesn't really remember anything else, but she wishes non-classroom times weren't so boring and is mildly concerned about the occasions when other children disappear beyond the doors into the lab and don't come back.
Melanie is, of course, a feral zombie child! The book takes place post-zombie-apocalypse, and a research team is studying Melanie and the other zombie children, who appear to be the only zombies with brain functions left, in hopes of finding a cure.
The first part of the book, which sets up the whole weird dynamic of the School For Children Who Don't Overcome Cannibalistic Impulses Good And Want To Learn How To Do Other Stuff Good Too, was my favorite part of the book by far. The post-apocalyptic road trip that follows through most of the middle of the book is well-done and interesting as post-apocalyptic road trips go, but felt a bit more like a standard zombie novel and much less striking than the setup. I am much more stressed out by Authority Figures Betraying Small Children than by Random Zombie Attack #6.
As I said above, I found the book incredibly compelling, and I liked what Carey was trying to do with the ending, but in the post-book afterglow, I admit I have some unanswered questions.
- OK, a minor one, but: how old is Melanie supposed to be, anyway? Is it ever said? Does anyone know? Maybe it was stated early on, but I cannot for the life of me remember and it's bugging me
- speaking of, how old were all the feral zombie children when they were brought in? I would imagine that most of them missed out on some very important stages of early child development while wandering around in zombieland, so how is it that by the time we start the book, they are all communicating fluently in English and ready to learn advanced geometry?
- how the heck did Melanie convince the feral zombie tribe at the end, which she had just ATTACKED and whose leader she had just STRAIGHT-UP MURDERED, to sit down placidly for Lessons With Miss Justineau?
- and, once again: early child development! Several of the feral zombie children are in their preteens or so, if I remember right, and they are all described as nonverbal, so, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but is this not a little too late for solid language acquisition? It's a nice gesture to have Miss Justineau teach them all Greek mythology and ensure the survival of culture and civilization in a world ruled by our new zombie overlords, but ... I'm guessing Melanie might have better luck with the next generation of feral zombie children. JUST A THOUGHT.
- or else with her classmates? I'm extremely worried about Melanie's feral zombie classmates, who are, presumably, still all sitting in their cells at the end of the book, waiting for an authority figure to come back and let them out. Someone go help Melanie's classmates!
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Date: 2016-01-13 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-14 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2016-01-14 06:24 am (UTC)It's about a girl who goes to a very nice school and learns to use her psychic powers...but sometimes the children feel very sad, as if a dear friend has left them...but they can't remember anyone leaving. And the adults watch them all the time.
At points it was deliciously creepy, and definitely really unique.
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Date: 2016-01-13 06:45 am (UTC)I can't answer your question within the frame of the book, but Doylistically it might be a holdover from the original short story "Iphigenia in Aulis," which is essentially the first portion of the book with some names changed and a different aetiology for the zombie apocalypse; in that version, Melanie and her classmates were not brought in from the post-apocalyptic wild as feral children, but [short story spoiler!] raised in the experimental facility from birth, being the children of women who got zombified while pregnant.
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Date: 2016-01-14 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2016-01-14 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-13 02:40 pm (UTC)I second the rec for Lucifer above (though probably only if you've read Sandman), and would rec the Felix Castor books with caveats - Felix is a lot less charming than, say, Peter Grant, and also much less of a team player etc. (Which is partly due to a difference in genre? Rivers of London is a police procedural series with magic [similarly: Paul Cornell's Shadow Police books, which are much grittier police procedurals with magic - I enjoyed them but they are not nearly as fun as the Rivers of London books], while Felix Castor is a PI/exorcist, and Carey is very definitely working in the hardboiled detective/noir with magic genre.)
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Date: 2016-01-14 01:51 am (UTC)I've read the first two Felix Castor books by now! I agree that Felix himself is far less charming than Peter Grant, but the problem with Rivers of London is that I care too much about Leslie, so I'm on pause with those books until someone confirms for me that the Leslie defection plotline has been resolved in a way that I find satisfactory. So in the meanwhile I'm reading Felix Castor and enjoying the aim of befriending ghosts, and also Juliet the lesbian succubus (which is the character that a friend told me about to get me reading the series to begin with.)
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Date: 2016-01-14 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-15 07:05 am (UTC)Yeah, I'm willing to accept that zombabies learn differently than humans.
Also my read was that the feral kids sat down for Lessons With Ms. Justineau on the grounds that if they did not, Melanie would murder them all right in the face.