Review: The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

While programmes like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead have found mainstream popularity, it's still unusual in the book world for genre fiction to break out of its confines and find a wider audience.

One novel that is doing that is M. R. Carey's The Girl With All the Gifts - a zombie novel which transcends the boundaries of its genre to become something more.

Melanie is a very special little girl. She loves to learn, especially from her favourite teacher Miss Justineau. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When the soldiers come for her, one points a gun at her, while the other straps her into her chair so she can't even turn her head.

Our protagonist is 10-year-old Melanie, a zombie child in a world where zombies - or 'hungries' as they're called in this novel - have taken over Britain. The only survivors live in army bases like the one Melanie lives in, enclosed havens like the distant Beacon, or out on the streets, as vigilantes.

Melanie might be a 10-year-old hungry, but she's an intelligent, emotionally aware human being, and one whose voice immediately draws the reader in. I found myself liking Melanie from the moment I met her. As we see the world through Melanie's eyes, we learn about the other characters true selves - there's no hiding from children, and her outlook and opinions are brutally honest.

The story is told in third person, with chapters switching between Melanie, Miss Justineau and occasionally tough soldier Sergeant Parks and scientist Dr Caldwell (and, briefly, young soldier Gallagher). As the world Melanie lives in changes rapidly, the changing focus becomes important. We learn more about Britain as it is now, the town of Beacon, where the group are headed, and the hungry pathogen.

The Girl With All the Gifts is not a book that is heavy on plot. If anything, it's a road trip book, but with some zombies chucked in. The Girl With All the Gifts concentrates on human emotion and interaction, and examines how we perceive threats to our lives and where danger truly lies. It's a book about relationships - between colleagues, enemies and friends, but primarily between mentor and mentee, teacher and student, and, I believe, between mother and child.

My edition of The Girl With All the Gifts features a quote from Jenny Colgan, describing the book as "Kazuo Ishiguro meets The Walking Dead". I've never seen the latter, but I completely agree with the former. The Girl With All the Gifts packed the same emotional punch I experienced when I first read Never Let Me Go. I found the last few chapters of The Girl With All the Gifts heartrending, and had to take a few deep breaths when I got to the end (which I still find myself thinking about).

If you're a little wary of genre fiction, and don't really like to touch sci-fi/fantasy, I urge you to give The Girl With All the Gifts a go. You'll soon forget it's about zombies (that word isn't used) and instead you'll just find yourself caught up in a brilliant story.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Orbit. This in no way affected my review.

The Sunday Post (#34) and Showcase Sunday (#20)

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer, and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits and Tea and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie and the Story Siren. They're a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your blog, highlight our newest books and see what everyone else received for review, borrowed from libraries, or bought.

It's been a busy week, with lots of meetings, so I've acquired quite a few books. But first, here's (what little) has been happening on my blog.

Book review: Storm and Stone by Joss Stirling
Book review: A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh

Added to my shelves

Most of my stuff this week comes from Little, Brown and its various imprints. 

First up, I met with two of the editors from the Virago, Abacus and Blackfriars imprints. They gave me:
The Fields by Kevin Maher
Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon.Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. by Rob Delaney
The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert
Never Mind Miss Fox by Olivia Glazbrook
The Pink Suit by Nicole Mary Kelby
The Spring of Kasper Meier by Ben Fergusson
Friendship by Emily Gould






From the same people I also got The May Bride by Suzannah Dunn, which I'm showing separately because the cover is beautiful (although you can't tell from my rubbish picture!).

 

From the guys at Orbit, I got The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, which looks like it'll be a genre-busting novel, and I also got Blood Song by Anthony Ryan, the first in an epic fantasy series.

And finally from Little, Brown, I got sent Salvage by Keren David, which looks like a great YA novel.

And last but not least, I picked up a couple of books from the spare books room at work. 

First up is Oksa Pollock: The Forest of Lost Souls by Cendrine Wolf. This series is being billed as a French adventure series to rival Harry Potter, with a plucky heroine. This is the second book in the series, I need to get my hands on the first.
And I also picked up Jojo Moyes The One Plus One, which I've been hearing so much about. I read a couple of chapters on the train on the way home from work, and am enjoying it so far.







What have you added to your shelves?

Review: A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh

What do you do when someone's murder is made to look like the thousands of other deaths occurring in London, caused by a mysterious influenza-like plague?

If you're Stevie Flint in A Lovely Way to Burn by Louise Welsh, you try to find the murderer, even though around you the city is morphing. As plague takes over London, Stevie finds herself heading deeper into dying capital on the trail of the person or people who killed her boyfriend Dr Simon Sharkey.

A Lovely Way to Burn is a crime novel set in present day London. Everything we know and love and hate is there - tourists, hip nightspots, mundane jobs, boyfriends who stand you up. When Simon fails to show for a date, Stevie is rightly annoyed, and it's a few days before she decides to head to his flat and get her stuff back. Instead she finds Simon dead in bed, seemingly of natural causes.

Before she can think about it too much, Stevie is struck down by something flu-like. Welsh dedicates pages to Stevie's illness and her slow recovery. We learn about the plague before we even know its name - The Sweats - and we also learn just how tough Stevie is from how she survives, not just physically, but also mentally. It's clever of Welsh to give Stevie the plague so early, it tells us so much about Stevie's no nonsense, independent character that we otherwise could have wasted chapters learning about.

A former journalist turned shopping channel saleswoman, Stevie isn't your typical detective, but she's forced to become one when no one else will take up the task of finding Smon's murderer(s). Her lack of investigative power is more than made up for by her bravery - there were plenty of times when I found myself just wanting to reach into the pages and hold Stevie back from where she was going. But that tension Welsh creates really works - I was utterly hooked even as I dreaded what was coming next.

Welsh constructs an intelligent mystery within the pages of A Lovely Way to Burn, which had me guessing this way and that as to the identity of Simon's killer or killers, and his/her/their motives. Every time I thought I'd figured it out, I began to doubt myself because Stevie encountered a new piece of evidence, or I remembered something that had happened or had been mentioned pages before. Even at the very end, when it came to the big reveal, Welsh threw in some surprises.

A Lovely Way to Burn is primarily a crime novel, but it also explores dystopian London, and the issues that a rapidly changing world would bring. Stevie investigates Simon's murder herself because there are few police around to do so - those that aren't ill or haven't already died of the plague are exhausted from working non-stop. Resources are thin on the ground, and policing becomes about fighting blazes rather than anything proactive.

The plague also leads to deserted streets, the army locking things down and a curfew being instituted, and people fleeing their homes in the city for the countryside, in the hopes the plague won't follow them there. Welsh shows us glimpses of reactions to the plague (which has struck across the world) but there are plenty of questions to be answered in the next books following A Lovely Way to Burn in The Plague Times trilogy. We see no direct government response (although I assume the army and the curfew is down to them) and we see very little about how the rest of the world is reacting, or how places outside London are coping (if everyone in London heads to the countryside, doesn't that just become another London?).

A Lovely Way to Burn is a brilliant crime novel set in a slightly dystopian world. It's close enough to what we know to be utterly terrifying (remember H5N1?), and that was part of its hold on me. As I read it on the train, I was ultra sensitive to every person around me who coughed or sneezed or even so much as sniffed. Welsh has taken our everyday lives, given them a twist, and put them in the background of an intriguing, addictive novel.

How I got this book: From the publisher, Hodder. This in no way affected my review.

•A Lovely Way to Burn is out on March 20, 2014.

Review: Storm and Stone by Joss Stirling

The Finding Sky series by Joss Stirling was something I stumbled upon by accident, so when I got her new book, Storm and Stone, through the post, I was pretty happy.

I delved into Storm and Stone expecting more of what I'd found in the Finding Sky series - some danger, a little bit of angst, a whole lot of romance and a happy ending.

Instead, I got quite a lot of angst, and a crime story nestled in between a tale of growing up and surviving secondary school. In Storm and Stone Stirling has taken a typical tale of growing up - complete with Mean Girls - and stuck in a healthy dose of mystery.

American student Raven Stone starts off the new term at her English boarding school with a missing roommate and an encounter with the bitchiest girl around, who is set on making life for Raven as difficult as possible. With few friends, Raven finds herself striking up conversation with the new boys, Kieran Storm and his friend Joe Masters. But the new guys aren't what they seem, and neither are some of the students she goes to school with, who have weirdly morphed into Stepford kids.

As mentioned, Storm and Stone is primarily a novel about growing up. Raven faces bullies (really, really mean bullies) and family problems. She experiences the wonderful feeling of having a crush on someone who seems to have no interest in you (note the sarcasm) and is constantly trying to figure out why she doesn't fit in. There's at least something that Raven goes through that every female can relate to and has gone through at some point in their life.

While Raven tries to navigate life, she's also thrust into a mystery which seems almost impossible to unravel. All around her, students are disappearing and then coming back, devoid of their original personalities and more inclined to turn on the not-so-perfect, very human Raven. Although this might seem unrealistic, Stirling makes this plot point seem realistic by having Raven's friend Gina turn into one of these shells, causing her to completely ignore Raven. While most of us have probably never had brainwashed friends, I can definitely think of instances in my life where one day you were best friends with someone, and the next day they completely ignored you. Throwing Gina into the mix makes the mystery surrounding Raven much more believable.

I must throw in a mention of Kieran, Raven's love interest. There's no insta-love between the pair, thank goodness, but there is the more realistic insta-attraction. That's followed by the fact that Kieran is a very flawed human when it comes to emotions and communicating with people, even if he is super clever and a young James Bond of sorts. It's great to see a love interest with so many faults, and to have a love interest called up on those faults by the author, instead of having them ignored (coughEdwardfromTwilightcough).

Storm and Stone is a dark read at times. One section where Raven is attacked is particularly brutal, and seems like it's going to end very, very badly. Stirling isn't afraid to address tough issues like bullying, although some of her bullies don't get the comeuppance they deserve, even though they bullied her long before the events of the book took place. The central mystery is also a little weak, only because I felt the villains were a little one-sided and we didn't see enough of them for them to justify what they were doing. Since the focus of the book was Raven though, I understand why this was, as she also didn't see much of the criminals.

Overall though, Storm and Stone is a solid read, especially if you're looking to read some genre YA. With its mix of crime and mystery, Storm and Stone is a great alternative to all the YA dystopia out there.

How I got this book: From Oxford University Press for review

•Storm and Stone is released on February 6 2014.

The Sunday Post (#33) and Showcase Sunday (#19)

The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer, and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits and Tea and inspired by Pop Culture Junkie and the Story Siren. They're a chance to share news, a post to recap the past week on your blog, highlight our newest books and see what everyone else received for review, borrowed from libraries, or bought.

I haven't done one of these posts in a couple of weeks, so there's been a bit going on.

On the blog
Book review: Cress by Marissa Meyer
Book review: It Felt Like a Kiss by Sarra Manning
Book review: Inferno by Dan Brown
Film review: The Wolf of Wall Street
Book review: The Arab Uprisings by Jeremy Bowen
Book review: A Hundred Pieces of Me by Lucy Dillon
Top 10 Tuesday (#17) - top 10 bookish resolutions
Reading challenge 2014 - I lay out the rules for myself

Added to my shelves

I went to visit an agent this week, and he gave me a few books by authors he represents: Secrecy by Rupert Thomson, Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas, and Idiopathy by Sam Byers (not pictured).
I also got Cress by Marissa Mayer after sending a begging email to the publicist, while another publicist sent me Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings (she sent it before Christmas but it's only just arrived). I also met a PR for coffee and she brought along Matthew Reilly's The Tournament for me. And finally, I popped to the library and picked up a copy of The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan (not pictured),

What did you add to your shelves?

Review: Cress by Marissa Meyer

You know how books in a series tend to get progressively worse? How even when they're very good, the second book isn't better than the first, and the third isn't as good as the second and so on? Well, forget that when it comes to Marissa Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles, because somehow every book in the series just gets better and better.

Cress, the third book in The Lunar Chronicles (following Cinder and Scarlet), was one of the books I was most anticipating this year, and I'm so glad I didn't have to wait too long to get my hands on it.

While Cinder and her gang - Scarlet, Wolf, Thorne and Iko - float on their ship in space hiding from the many, many people chasing them, and while Emperor Kai prepares for his wedding to the evil Queen Levana, Cress sits aboard her spaceship dreaming of freedom.

When an opportunity to be rescued presents itself, Cress imagines being swept off her feet by Thorne and finding a great group of friends. What she gets is days of wondering through the desert, a hero who doesn't love her, and a group of allies who find themselves scattered and injured, all while trying to execute an audacious plan to stop the wedding of Kai and Levana.

I won't give too much away about the plot, but Cress is the most action-packed books of The Lunar Chronicles so far. Much of that action comes in the last quarter of the book, with the rest spent preparing for the battle to come, but it's all worth the wait.

Meyer is deft at bringing together the various storylines we've been following so far - the stories of Cinder, Scarlet, Wolf, Kai, Thorne, Cress and Dr Erland (and Iko, mustn't forget Iko) are all brought closer together even as the characters sometimes move physically far away from each other. Into this mix comes Jacin Clay - a Lunar who works for Queen Levana's right-hand woman Sybil - and Princess Winter, Queen Levana's stepdaughter and the central subject of the next book in The Lunar Chronicles series. Our glimpses of the latter are very brief, but Winter looks like one of the most intriguing characters we've been introduced to so far.

Cress is a dark novel - unsurprising since it deals with mass murder, good and evil, dictators and more - but it's not all doom and gloom. There are some very funny moments, mainly featuring Iko, who despite being a robot continues to be as human as anyone you might encounter in real life. And Thorne brings a sense of humour to the proceedings as well, despite everything that happens to him during the course of the book. He's definitely the hero I'd choose, so I can see why Cress loves him, even though she doesn't need him.

For me, Cress is the most fairytale like of The Lunar Chronicles books so far, with a princess in her tower waiting for a prince to rescue her. While Cress is very, very clever and self-sufficient, she holds on to the image of being liberated from her spaceship by Thorne, rather than doing the liberating herself.

Thankfully, Meyer twists the fairytale trope pretty deftly. While Cress may not realise it, and while she spends much of the book falling deeper for Thorne while he plays the just friends card, she's actually the real hero of this book. Cress is the one leading the way, fighting for survival and putting herself in real danger - in short, she takes on the traditional role of the prince in the fairytale. Thorne, meanwhile, has to spend much of the book dependent on others, after a fight leaves him injured.

Cress is about a book about heroes and heroines, and its strong female characters are the true stars of the novel, and that make this book worth reading. It's the women who stand head and shoulders above the men in The Lunar Chronicles (though not all of them good), and it's these types of women (the good ones, anyway) who should be at the centre of fairytales being told to children the world over.

How I got this book: From the publicist at Puffin (thanks!)

•Cress is out on February 4