Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A great addition to its genre (but you’re better off not knowing what it is)

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

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This is a book best discovered blind, without knowing the plot or even genre. But if you already know, or don’t mind mild spoilers, read ahead. “That’s Pandora…she was a really amazing woman. All the gods had blessed her and given her gifts. that’s what her name means, the girl with all the gifts. So she was clever and brave and beautiful and funny, and everything else you’d want to be. But she just had the one tiny fault, which was that she was very, […]

Hits all the high notes, and yet…

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey

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This novel is a modern-day retelling of the story of Pandora (as the literal translation of the title ‘The Girl With All The Gifts’). A plague of fungus has wiped out most of humanity, hijacking the bodies of the infected and using them to spread the downfall further. Yet through the hopelessness emerges a group of children who have retained their humanity and intelligence, despite the infection. It is hypothesised that they may hold hope for the cure. They live wild on the streets of […]

“You can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.”

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The Girl With All the Gifts is a bit slow moving at first. We start with Melanie, a precocious young girl who is being raised in captivity on a military base. She, along with two dozen other children, have various teacher who give them a variety of lessons. Ms Justineau is Melanie’s favorite teacher in part because she reads Greek myths to the class. But this isn’t a regular school; the children are kept locked up in cells and they attend their classes bound to wheelchairs. […]

Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Wonder

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I’ve been meaning to read The Girl with All the Gifts since the film came out last year. As usual, I kept putting it off until one of my book clubs assigned it. This was voted as the Mocha Girls Read supernatural pick for October. I read nearly half of it in one day, finally finished it up in December. I’m glad that I did, still a wild ride despite hearing spoilers during the in person discussion. I’m not a fiercely against them when it comes […]

Like revisiting an (alarming, homicidal) old friend

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This isn’t exactly a sequel, but takes place at roughly the same time and in the same world as the phenomenal The Girl With All the Gifts. A terrible fungus has been released on the world, turning all who are exposed into “hungries” – basically zombies. The survivors have banded together, and a crew of scientists and soldiers sets out into the post-apocalyptic mayhem to gather samples, reconnoiter, and look for a solution. We follow this crew on their journey: a pregnant scientist (Rina Khan), […]

She’s up all night for good fun….she’s up all night to finish the girl with all the gifts

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“If the road to knowledge was paved with dead children she’d still walk it” I read this book in two days. I stayed up at night, survived work all bleary eyed and then went home to read more. This book is tense, y’all. It opens with Melanie a smart girl, a girl dreaming about Greek mythology. She likes Pandora. She likes the name and the box and the hope that is unleashed with the evil. “And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of […]



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