Review: Eve and Adam

By Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant
Available now from Feiwel & Friends (Macmillan)
Review copy

I read EVE AND ADAM under the worst circumstances possible: on a plane, sitting directly in front of a screeching child who was way to be old to be screeching.  (Her baby sister and older brother were well behaved, thankfully.)  But I still enjoyed the first young adult novel spouses Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant collaborated on, years after working on the Animorphs.

Evening Spiker lives a pretty normal life, albeit a rich one, until she's hit by a car while contemplating an apple at a fruit stand.  She loses her leg in the accident and her mother spirits her away to her clinic for a special treatment.  There she meets Solo - her mother's ward, who she never knew about.  He starts hinting that there's lots of things she doesn't know about.  Plus, she has to keep breaking out to help her best friend Aislin with her druggie boyfriend.  Meanwhile, she plays around with an in-development kid's computer game to create the perfect boy.

EVE AND ADAM is extremely fast paced, with Dan Brown or James Patterson-style short chapters that keep you turning the pages.  I'm a science fiction fan and absolutely nuts for any stories involving genetic manipulation, so EVE AND ADAM was also pinging a bunch of my favorite tropes.

Now, a lot of the early twists are easy to see coming.  (In fiction, you can't put a big group of scientists together without mad science happening, as you know.)  But there are some later twists that are more surprising.  I kept wishing for less of Aislin's druggie boyfriend, but it looks like he's not going to be in the picture for sequel ADAM AND EVE.  (Thank goodness.)

If you read the Animorphs, you know what you're in for.  Banter, moral dilemmas, and lots of action.  Honestly, it's the sort of read that works perfectly on a plane, even if you have to read it through the screams of an uncouth child.