I’m torn about how to review fiction. I personally hate spoilers. And The Girl With All The Gifts is particularly nice if you have no idea what sort of book you’re reading. So if you’re inclined to trust me and just buy a book and read it without knowing what it’s about, just do it. Amazon says it’s similar to Wool and The Martian so if you liked those, give this a try.

So, shallow spoiler alert begins here.

The Girl With All The Gifts is a zombie book. I would say it is the second-best zombie book I have read, after World War Z. It has a really fun beginning if you don’t realize that it’s a book about zombies, but that’s a hard experience to create if you’re reading this paragraph. Sorry. I had the perfect setup of buying this for my Kindle, then forgetting about it for a month or so, then not remembering what the book was but seeing it unread on my Kindle and reading it. Magnificent! I recommend that methodology if you can swing it.

It is not the sort of zombie book that is grisly and scary like an action movie. Instead it is about a small girl who is a zombie but who is also intelligent enough to understand her situation and to be cute and threatening at the same time. The zombie apocalypse has never had so much empathy for the zombies’ side before.

There are a lot of parts of the book which are pretty interesting, but they almost all are enhanced by surprising the reader and I don’t want to reveal too much. If what I’ve written so far doesn’t convince you to read the book, I don’t see how I’ll be able to do it, so for the sake of spoilers I’ll stop here.