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

[missingvolume]

I had read the short story by Carey in An Apple for the Creature that became the genesis of this novel. The world is taken over by hungries [another word for zombies]. This has been caused by a mutation in a fungus that takes over ants. Melanie is a child hungry but she is different from most of them. She and a handful of hungry children are being taught school and occasionally dissected to find a possible cure to the plague of hungries. The military base she is being kept at is overrun by hungries that have been stampeded by people that haven't been infected yet and refuse to live in the military bases. Four people manage to escape along with Melanie. They set out to try and find the main base and evade the hungries and the other non-infected people[junkers].  The trip is self discovery for Melanie as she finds out she isn't just a normal little girl. A few minor things bothered me in the story but they really didn't detract from the plot more of how do they still have cigarettes so many years after the collapse of society. Not that anyone was smoking them but they kept getting mentioned as barter material.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Edelweiss