The Girl With All the Gifts offers a refreshing angle on a tired genre and is quickly becoming a classic. M. R. Carey uses strong characters to tell an engaging story full of emotion where humanity struggles to survive in a world overrun by hungries (zombies). Human conflict is a pretty common thread woven into many apocalyptic stories as characters are typically more concerned with petty personal agendas than banding together to survive. This story is not much different in that regard except the agendas aren't petty and the disagreements are viewed from a unique perspective - that of a child hungry named Melanie.

It turns out that only 99.9% of all the hungries are mindless, flesh eating monsters. There exists a very rare subset that are semi-intelligent children (but still flesh eating monsters) and these are rounded up for study in the hope that understanding why they are different will lead to a potential cure. Hotel Echo is the military base set up for this research project and the location where you are introduced to the 3 main human characters:

1) The hardened military man, Sergeant Parks, who only cares about executing his mission and keeping everyone safe from the hungries. He only loosely understands why Hotel Echo is organized like an elementary school and is certain that his innate mistrust of all hungries is what keeps everyone alive. 

2) There is Doctor Caroline Caldwell, the brilliant and ruthless head of the research project, who is desperately trying to find a cure to the plague. The children are extremely valuable test subjects to her and her research is really the only hope that humanity has of survival.

3) And finally, Helen Justineau is a psychologist and one of the many teachers responsible for studying the child hungries and probing the limits of their intelligence. She comes to realize that these children are not much different from normal human children except for the unfortunate disease they are afflicted with. She comes to believe that if humanity is to be worth surviving it will be because of the way she cares for the afflicted children.

The interactions of this volatile mix of human personalities is viewed from the perspective of Melanie, one of the child hungries that has been captured. Melanie is the star pupil of the research project and she slowly begins to sort out the bigger picture of the state of the world and her place within it. This is what makes this story compelling as you will find yourself with conflicted emotions as Melanie's awareness grows. The tension and the stakes build up until it all culminates into a very satisfying ending that makes me willing to overlook a couple of the weaker plot points. I definitely recommend giving this a try as it brings to the surface many emotions in a genre known mostly for just evoking fear.

Finty Williams does a great job as the narrator of the audiobook and in 2016 there will be a movie adaption starring Glenn Close as Caroline Caldwell.