Review: The Girl With All The Gifts

M/R. Carey

Book Title: The Girl With All The Gifts
Author: M.R. Carey
Published: 2014 by Orbit (Little, Brown Book Group)
Pages: 403
Find it at: Amazon
My Rating: 5/5

Goodreads Blurb!
Not every gift is a blessing...

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.

The Girl With All the Gifts is a groundbreaking thriller, emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end.

My Thoughts!

The Girl With All The Gifts is what would leave you shuddering, for various reasons, depending on how you interpret it. Melanie, a ten year old girl living with her classmates at the 'base', knows no other home. Getting strapped into a wheelchair every morning with a gun pointed at her, she gets ready for classes, and a few other routine things every week or so. As you read this book, get ready to dive into a future where nothing seems safe anymore. Guard yourself with arms, lots of e-blocker and only then go about your day. If you have a day left, that is.

At the base, Melanie takes classes with different teachers, none of whom are as good as Miss Justineau, who frequently tells them stories. Nobody likes Caroline Caldwell, the woman who runs the 'programme'. What happens when one day, Mrs Caldwell asks for Melanie? Who are those men slinking around the boundaries of the base? And when everything is turned around, how can things get even worse? But they do. And that's when you, as a reader would start realizing what is happening. Set in a dystopian setting (or something more imaginative and horrifying than that), this book is about the life of a girl who likes imagining herself as Pandora - the girl said to have all the gifts. This book is also about fighting for survival and about goodness in the midst of evil. It is also about personal life goals and crossing limits, boundaries and whatever has been set for you, just to achieve those. It's about love for fellow humans, even strangers, because sometimes those are all you have. It's also about surrender and about why it can be okay to give up, to make the best of the situation at hand.

The story has been written in third person, but even that narration seemed different to me somehow. It transitioned from nearly one person's perspective to someone else throughout the book, which I thought was inventive. This is also a great book if you want to increase your vocabulary. I've underlined so many words I didn't know even existed! Other than that, I liked all the characters, even the horrendous Mrs Caldwell, since they all seemed to be carrying their own back stories and even if you hate anyone, it's not without good cause. More than that, it's Melanie and Miss Justineau's relationship and their strong character sketches that keep the book going. It's hard not to empathise with characters like them. The sequence of events is such that the book's bound to keep you hooked, especially since it'll be a long time when you start understanding what's it all about. That's when you'll find yourself in a confounded state, because you'll be wanting to shut your eyes as you read on about unimaginable stuff, but you'd be automatically reading it nonetheless. 

I really can't talk a lot about this book without giving away anything, which I don't want to, because that'd be spoiling the reading experience for you. But I'd recommend all lovers of futuristic, apocalyptic, horror stories to read this book. It's also part fantasy, but mostly about human relationships, especially that of a child and parent. It's classified under horror not because it's the 'OMG-there-comes-a-foul-ghost' kind of scary, but the kind that slowly seeps into your veins as you read the words, and since it's already running in your blood, you'll feel cold all the time. Yes. That kind.    

Quotes marked from the book:

'You can't save people from the world. There's no where else to take them.'

'Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself. That you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they're something different than they are.'

'It's not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.'

'When your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.'

'The horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand.'

Book Talk: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Book Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Published: 1953 (Ballantine Books)

Pages: 159

Find it at: Amazon

Spoiler alert: This is also kind of a summary, not just a review.

They call it dystopian. I feel what Bradbury predicted might not be far from a potential possibility. A haunting tale of a future where 3D, televised 'families' are more important than the people you live with, where firemen are armed with kerosene and matches and light fire in houses where books are reported to be. They cannot remember a time when firemen used to put out fires and people like the young girl Clarisse, who dare to ask questions or spend time to 'think', are considered mad and unsuitable for society. The basic premise is that no one should ever be sad, and for that, everyone has to be ridden of things that make humans sad.

Guy Montag, a fireman with a wife (Mildred) devoted to her TV 'family', meets seventeen year old Clarisse and finds her strange because of the kind of questions she asked and how she made him think about things he hadn't thought about lately. When did he last smile? Was he happy? But soon, it becomes a routine when he meets her every evening for a few minutes as she walks along, an air of wonder and curiosity in her features, something that's so new to Guy that he feels sad just spying on her family next door. One day, he feels something's off and he never sees Clarisse again. Then there was another house reported where the firemen find an old woman clinging to her books, and when she refuses to leave them, Guy looks on horrified as his boss lets her light up her house herself, and dying in that fire inside.

That incident shakes him up and for the first time in years, he's craving for real company, but his wife doesn't understand his sadness and wants to stay with her TV family, his boss seems to know something, to understand this stage in a fireman's life, but is mean about it, the robot dog at the station seems to be growling at him more and more, and he's started hiding books in his own home. Soon enough, he realizes that he cannot live there anymore. There's the war coming and people are to busy driving rashly, staring into 3D people and screens, listening to talks with earpieces permanently stuck in their ears, looking at advertisements constantly running on billboards so people cannot pause to think for themselves. He soon turns into a Wanted man, and makes a run for his life.

A lot many things happen with Guy in this book, beginning with coming across Clarisse and getting a jolt out of the everyday desensitized living, to being hunted by the whole city and escaping into another world. He realizes he's not alone, but the power of the world overtaken by the craze of keeping everyone from thinking is too much and the rest are too small in number. Yet, they're hopeful. As the frenzied society comes to an end, these men, with memorized books and knowledge, armed with hope and ideas, set to rebuild the society, all of which has been wiped out by war. 

With a title that refers to the temperature at which paper burns, Fahrenheit 451 talks about books and censorship (because academic plain texts, I think, and user manuals were allowed) and the power of independent thought and ideas, things people are banned from indulging in. It's a good, short read, well described, although you might feel like it's become stagnant in between. It picks up pace, however, in the later half of the book. It's also been written in a way that made me wonder if there were perhaps printing errors, with phrases repeated, but that's how it is. It leaves the reader to ponder over what is happening even now. What makes me praise this book is the timing and the imagination. This was written in 1953, and what Bradbury imagined then seems much too possible right now. So what if we don't have radios plugged in the ears? We have headphones. We have more screens - LCD, computer, tablets, smartphones, etc - than books. If this situation of an imagined world would shake you up and make you slow down a little, be sure to read this book. If you still have the time to read, that is.

Some quotes from the book:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there."

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” 

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.” 

“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.” 

“Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.” 

Review: Insurgent by Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth

Title: Insurgent

Author: Veronica Roth

Published: 2012 by Harper Collins

Pages: 525

Find it at: Amazon

My Rating: 4/5!

Goodreads blurb!

One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

Tris's initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

My thoughts!

Insurgent continues from where Divergent ended with Tris, her brother Caleb and friend-cum-lover Tobias walking away from a terrible simulation controlled war, towards what they hope is safety. Turns out it's safe nowhere. There are secrets, people hiding those secrets, people so vulnerable that they can be controlled and made to kill at the press of a button, development of new simulation technology, deaths, tears and helplessness. With the simulation controlled Dauntless killing off half of the Abnegation, there's a conflict among the different factions. The Erudite is in control, Candor and Amity do not want to get involved and Tris has changed. She's now controlled by grief, at the loss of her parents who died for Abnegation, at the loss of her faction, at seeing half the Dauntless turn into traitors and joining Erudite. More than that, she's overwhelmed with guilt at shooting and killing a friend who was simulation-controlled and a danger to her life. Later in the book, in parts where she faces danger, she's the one who'll act at the drop of a hat! Totally reckless.

As the story moves on, Tris and Tobias and the rest of Dauntless who want to stop Jeanie (who's controlling all the actions), venture from one place to another, one person to another, facing dangers and unbelievable situations. There's a growing strife between Tris and Tobias, as both of them are hiding some things from the other. Also, Tobias is frustrated with the reckless attitude Tris seems to adopt. There are many new characters in this book, all from different factions (made essential as all the factions ultimately get involved in the fight) and some old characters have been defined and stretched more than they were previously (thank you so much of action!). I wouldn't say any of them was a sore. I liked the way all of them seem real, they're flawed and behave much closer to how you or I would act. While it was good to see and read about new personalities, it did get a bit confusing, especially as the book is so long (which is good too, by the way. Too many pages of awesomeness!). Or maybe I felt this way because I read it little by little, in parts, rather than at a stretch. 

The story is great, very much capable of keeping you on tenterhooks, specially if you read it continuously. There's a lot of action and hopping around different factions, revelations after every few pages, suspense at just the right places, measured humor and sensible dialogues. Reading it is a pleasure, definitely. More than just looking at it from a simple reader's point of view, I would also appreciate the way these books (Divergent and Insurgent) have projected a possible futuristic society. I know it sounds too far fetched to be real someday, but the rate at which technology is going, I think mind-control simulations would be here someday,  and with this book, we know how, if power goes into the wrong hands, it can destroy a whole society. I like how this book goes to a deeper level, as if addressing these fears and pretending they've actually taken shape. Pretty much evident from the jump to a more serious writing style than I felt in Divergent. And oh, the ending! It's killing me. I want to know what happens next! This book has one of the most suspense-filled endings!

As always, some lines from the book I marked: 

"Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like"

"People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them."

"You're insane," says Tobias, "that's not the way the world works, with everyone keeping score."

"It's not?" Peter raises his eyebrows. "I don't know what world you live in, but in mine, people only do things for you for one of two reasons. The first is if they want something in return. And second is if they feel like they owe you something."

"Those aren't the only reasons people do things for you," I say. "Sometimes they do them because they love you."

The only thing that didn't make me happy was the relevance of the word "Insurgent". It's been mentioned only once, that too towards the end when a character calls Tris Insurgent, a word he created to describe her. "Noun. A person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as belligerent." I mean, yes, it does define how Tris has been behaving throughout the book, and probably it's right, meant to be this way, but it didn't sit well with me. Maybe because it came towards the end. I like suspense, but suspense over what the title means? Maybe not. Divergent was better in this aspect at least. We knew what we're reading about. Just to mention, I loved Divergent much more. But then , I always love the first books in the series best. It might be a first-book-bias, for all I know! 

Recommended for: Young Adult readers, Teenagers, Science fiction and dystopian lovers!