Tellulah Darling

Gonna make a giant generalization here and say that it’s easy to make a creepy dystopian. I mean, that’s kind of the baseline, right? We want to be chilled and unnerved by this vision of a near-future that has just enough recognizability to feel like what’s in store for us should we fail to get our collective act together.

Then there are the books that take it one step further into heart wrenching emotion. (Hunger Games and Feed trilogies, I’m looking at you.) The books that not only devastate us, but uplift us, because even when things are at their bleakest, humanity will find a way to love, and laugh, and hope.

Enter The Girl With All The Gifts. I’m not going to give away spoilers, though things are revealed pretty quickly. The future this book presents is chilling and bleak and in the hands of a lesser author, that would have been the entire takeaway.

However, the heart of this book is the relationship between Melanie and her teacher Miss Justineau. This relationship pushes the book into the realm of the truly great in this genre.

Melanie is a lens through which our understanding of all the adult characters is filtered. The naive student ends up teaching us more about humanity and ourselves than could have been imagined by anyone at the start of the novel.

There is a second book, but this story feels complete in and of itself. So if you’re looking for your next great read, pick up The Girl With All the Gifts.