I don't know who I am anymore. For a long time, I had a strict no-horror policy, on the theory that I am a huge chickenshit and really like sleeping. But now I have not only read a zombie book, I have read enough zombie books, enough thoughtful zombie books, that I have enough to propose as a theme for my science fiction and fantasy book club. Horror as written word seems to be something from which I'm no longer staying far away. (Movies, with visuals I can't get rid of, are different.)
This wasn't that scary a horror book, horror more by benefit of the presence of zombies than anything else, I guess. It's really the story of a young woman discovering who she is. That who she is happens to be a "hungry" is part of the journey she takes with some of the last humans in England.
I am finding it very hard to talk about this book without referring to Richard Matheson's classic I Am Legend, and doing so in a way that would spoil both books. So, from this point in, if spoilers matter to you and you haven't read one or the other, you may want to tap out.
It feels like The Girl With All the Gifts owes a lot to I Am Legend, even though the original book is not about zombies, recent movie versions notwithstanding. Because under all the horror of the last few humans alive is the promise of a new civilization being born in the ashes, and the ways in which the humans trying to survive/thrive is threatening to what is a new world order. We're already extinct, we just don't know it.
But that's not where we start. It doesn't take long to figure out that Melanie is a hungry, but it's not said explicitly for a while. All we know is that she's a child taking classes, but buckled tightly to the chair and muzzled before she's taken out of her cell. She loves one of her teachers, Miss Justineau, deeply. She starts to figure out that some of the children, when they are taken away, don't come back. She encounters Miss Justineau without the endocrine blocker all humans wear around hungries, and starts to become aware of her own nature.
Then the scientist in charge decides to try to saw Melanie's head off. She is callous about killing her charges, seeing them as specimens rather than infected humans, needing to cure the disease that created zombies at all costs. Miss Justineau is perfectly ready to see them as children, to the point where she is distressed to see Melanie when she gets too close without the endocrine blocker, and Melanie is transformed, for the first time she herself can remember, into a hunger with legs.
Melanie is not dissected, and she, Miss Justineau, Dr. Caldwell (the scientist), and two soldiers end up on the run out through what's left of Britain. Around this time, the narrative shifts from being mostly from Melanie's point of view to being mostly the adults. I only noticed this when I started to think about it, and it's a pity. Even when Melanie finds a colony of other hungry kids - unlike the adults, retaining human capabilities of thought and speech - narratively we live in Miss Justineau's head as the story is told.
The reason that this bothers me a bit is that this is also around the time that Melanie starts being able to control her hunger, her involuntary reactions to the smell of humans, and as she starts to be able to suppress it, we don't get any of the internal monologue of what that is like, how she does it and why. There are a few brief glimpses, but it's really kind of handwavey, glossed over very quickly. Gaining control over an involuntary response caused by a disease is really pretty remarkable, and I'd have been happier if we'd been in Melanie's head for the struggle to do that, as we were for most of the first half of the book.
And then there's the ending, which is very similar to that of I Am Legend, as Miss Justineau becomes perhaps the last human left alive, in an iconic role for the hungry children who will survive the end of the human race as we were, before we find out what will come next. Where the protagonist of I Am Legend discovers he's become the bogeyman for a new race, Miss Justineau will be the intellectual mother.
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