This compulsively readable science-fiction thriller from husband-and-wife team Michael Grant (BZRK; the Gone series) and Katherine Applegate (The One and Only Ivan) stars teenage Eve Spiker, who's assigned an unusual task by her mother: to create the perfect male.
Eve has survived a run-in with a San Francisco trolley that would have crippled anyone else--anyone whose mother was not the brilliant mind behind Spiker Biopharmaceuticals. Terra Spiker and one of her gofers, Solo Plissken, whisk Eve away from the E.R. back to the Spiker labs. Solo is the first to point out Eve's lightning-quick recovery; Eve begins to wonder what's really going on in the lab--and suspects Solo knows a lot more than he's admitting. As the co-authors cut back and forth between Eve's and Solo's first-person narratives, they slowly uncover, layer by layer, the work of the labs and the reasons Solo seems so fiercely resentful of Eve's mother. Each teen has his or her own preconceived notions, which cause them to put up blinders until they cannot escape the truth. Eve's best friend, Aislin, introduces a number of hairpin plot twists, and when Solo helps the two friends sneak out of Spiker labs, Eve believes she's made an ally. Or is Solo using Eve to get revenge on Terra Spiker?
Grant and Applegate investigate larger themes of what it means to play god, and the moral dilemmas that accompany that responsibility. Humor and romance leaven the proceedings. Give this to fans of Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness