Title: Eve & Adam
Author: Michael Grant & Katherine Applegate
Publish date: October 2nd 2012 by Feiwel & Friends
Source: ARC provided by the publisher
Buy it from: Amazon
Goodreads summary:
In the beginning, there was an apple—
And then there was a car crash, a horrible injury, and a hospital. But before Evening Spiker’s head clears a strange boy named Solo is rushing her to her mother’s research facility. There, under the best care available, Eve is left alone to heal.
Just when Eve thinks she will die—not from her injuries, but from boredom—her mother gives her a special project: Create the perfect boy.
Using an amazingly detailed simulation, Eve starts building a boy from the ground up. Eve is creating Adam. And he will be just perfect… won’t he?
Review:
I really did not have very high expectations of Eve & Adam. To be honest, the few sci-fi novels that I read this year (excepting, of course, Scarlet) left me reluctant to keep on keeping on with the genre. The plots had been poorly executed with little character development and nothing stand-out about the writing. But Eve & Adam stood apart in the best of ways.
Told from dual perspectives, each voice is clear and distinct. Perhaps this is due to the collaboration between husband and wife duo, Grant & Applegate. Regardless of the cause, however, Solo and Eve are both wonderful characters with developed personalities and complex motivations. Also, hooray for Eve having a best friend that was not annoying as hell, but funny, flawed, and a good friend! I believe crappy besties to be a plague in many YA novels
I was particularly fascinated by the compound of Spiker pharmaceuticals. The authors managed to draw it out for me so that I had a clear picture of the setting. I pictured a very sterile, techy environments. The science of the novel is probably questionable, but 1) it’s science fiction and 2) I was an English major, so unless they tried to convince me that the sky was brown or something, nothing jarred me from the world of the novel to point a finger and go “WAIT.”
I really loved the direction that they went with “Adam.” The summary makes it sound super dark and creepy, but instead it was more of an interesting contemplation of perfection and how perfection is really subjective.
Along with this… twists, guys! Twists all OVAH the place! And they didn’t feel contrived, like the authors were just throwing them out there to be like “BAM. SURPRISE.” Not that I wasn’t surprised, but they made sense.
To sum up: If you’re looking for a sci-fi novel that takes place within a world you recognize, you couldn’t ask for a quicker and more enjoyable ride than Eve & Adam.
