With this blurb printed in block letters on the front cover: THE MOST ORIGINAL THRILLER YOU WILL READ THIS YEAR; and with this enigmatic synopsis on my mass-market paperback edition: 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--you would jump into a conclusion that The Girl with all the Gifts is in fact something you have not read or seen before. Until you dive in to its pages you would realize that you were duped. And it's the worst kind of deception in literature: dolling up an exhausted piece of work to hide its glaring triteness just to manipulate people to grab a copy. 
 The only way to get through this book is to accept it for what it is: a zombie novel. 
 M.R. Carey, his editor, and his fans could perhaps argue that TGWATG is of course original. I'm afraid, however, that the word they wish to modify this book with is renovative. May we never confound ourselves with originality (the quality of being new and different) with renovation (the restoration to a better state). Now I understand that ideas have had their births years and years ago, and our generation is scraping them up with a new taste acquired from which the plates they came. Zombies? I don't have a definite knowledge how old their idea is, but I'm absolute that they are ancient. The Bible, to my best awareness, even contains a ressurection in its thick pages; hence to say that this novel is original is an overstatement, one that largely destroys my day. 
 Then why have I given it four stars? One reason: it's the most renovative zombie thriller I read this year. 
 In M.R. Carey's dystopia zombies are called "hungries", and some of them could think, talk, and do all sorts of human activities. This exception lies higher possibility to children. Although they have the insatiable hunger of a zombie, they still have some human aspects subsisting inside them. And what could be a lot more hair-raising than a pack of young zombies that can think of various ways how to capture you?--the kind that could hardly be escaped from because even after they lost sight of you, they would hunt you down, armed to the teeth with diverse weapons like slingshots, baseball bats, knives? The protagonist, Melanie, is the most sophisticated of them all. Not only could she do these things, but she could also contain her hunger. 
 I would have given this five stars because it kept me reading, thrilled, and wanting more. I developed care for the characters, and when some of them died it rather pained me. If anything, the characters made the story a lot more engaging. And the ending had a haunting atmosphere to it. It insinuated a vague future, but one that made sense to me, not to mention scared me. How the story was presented to me is the reason why I gave this four stars:- 
 The prose is unimpressive but bearably mediocre. At least Carey did not try to do some linguistic gymnastics only to fail and sound like a douche. Although I must admit that some parts in his writing inspired a roll or two in my eyes. The man should learn how to effectively use fragments for times of tension in the storyline, not throw them at every opportunity he could get. To me, his fragments felt like a stroll around a park on a fine, fine day. Every thing is perfect, right? So you move along, until you stop dead on your track when you run into dog shit shaped like a Hershey's Kiss. You have not much choice but leap over it. But when you round the corner, another stops you from your stroll. How aggravating is that? It makes you want to give the scavenger a holler (or in M.R. Carey's case, his editor) to tell him to do his job and do it now. 
 Oh and his typesetter too. It makes me want to scream at whomever the typesetter was for this book that there were enough typographical errors and missing words to propel me to take out my red pen. 
 Did I get an ARC by accident?