Why is the zombie apocalypse never sunny?
A Book With More Than 400 Pages - The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey.
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.
This is another book which I'd seen in a lot of the 'best books of 2014' lists. For some reason I was under the impression this book was about super powers. I'm not entirely sure why. I think I'd somehow come to that conclusion by catching half of a conversation or something. So I was very enthusiastic for this novel about a little girl who had super powers that were somehow so terrifying that she was kept in a government facility. It quickly became very clear that I was totally wrong, and the fact that I was disappointed was completely my own fault in this case. I know that's a problem of mine sometimes. I get too excited about what I think a book is about, and where I think it's going, rather than letting it just tell its story. I'll admit to that one.
The Girl With All The Gifts is a zombie book. Which I tried not to hold against it. I think there's still room to have new and interesting ideas in the genre (I think convincing people to read them while the genre is so overstuffed is much more difficult.)
The story is a fairly familiar post-apocalyptic one, it pulled up one or two new ideas but on the whole it is something I've seen done before, in a few novels, and more than a few short stories. It's a direction I don't really mind and the characters were good, engaging, real-feeling people. It also helped that Melanie is one of those narrators that I like, where it's clear they're more naive than the people around them, and the reader can work out far more of what's happening in the world through their observations than what the main character is aware of. I don't know if there's a word for that...something something narrator?
But if you're willing to read another zombie book, I think it's worth giving a look.