The Girl with all the Gifts by MR Carey review

   

 I had a friend convince me to read this one. Well, not exactly.  The truth is, I remember her stating a few times over while we were playing video games and talking about new books we read that she had mentioned this title a few times and my thought was "hmm, that's a neat name for a book", but I was so into killing whatever alien we were fighting in the game that I was only half listening to her and had forgotten the title within 5 seconds.
     Fast forward to just a couple months ago and she sends me a link to a movie that's about to come out and I watch the trailer and immediately become obsessed with figuring out what is happening because it leaves a whole heck of a lot to interpretation but all I see is zombie children and I'm like hell yes that's amazing.
     I ask her the book title and she kinda sighs and tells me I don't listen and then lets me know it's called "The Girl With All The Gifts".  I'm just like, "hmm, that's a neat name for a book".  (That remark was met with silence btw.)
     So I get my fiance to go to the bookstore and pick it up for me, which is an ordeal and a half in itself because he has no idea where it's at in the store and when he asks me which section it's in I'm just like, "probably horror....or maybe fiction....or maybe YA....not quite sure, just ask the people at the front where the book about the zombie kids is at." He wasn't happy.  The last books he read were the Harry Potter series (meaning he doesn't exactly read too often) so he's not quite as thrilled about going to bookstores and sniffing the books as I am and just wanted to get out of there.
     Anyway, so I get the book and the next few days are just an absolute thrill ride.  It's awesome, there's lots of action in the book, I'm reading it every spare moment I get......and then I get to the end. My brain goes into overload: "WTF just happened?  Did she really just do that? But she was good!? No, I guess she wasn't good? But then if she wasn't good then who should I have been rooting for?  I don't like this!! Well, maybe she still is good cuz she's the only one who thinks about saving the world??"
     So the long and short of it is this:  the book was amazing but you're either going to love or hate the ending.  Even though it wasn't anything like the ending of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, for some reason I get that vibe from it because I know people who don't do well with reading about bad things happening to kids and both of these books have that really dark un-kid-friendly tone to them.  You'll have to be the judge of that.  Right now I'm going to stop thinking about who has the correct morals in that book and instead just try to figure out what a country full of spore clouds might look like.  For some reason I picture them as tiny atomic bomb mushroom clouds like this:

Anyone else? No, it's just me? Well, alrighty then......