Review: Eve and Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

Eve and Adam (Eve and Adam #1)

By Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

Release Date: October 2, 2012

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Hardcover, 304 pages

Sixteen-year-old Evening Spiker lives an affluent life in San Francisco with her mother, EmmaRose, a successful geneticist and owner of Spiker Biotech. Sure, Evening misses her father who died mysteriously, but she’s never really questioned it. Much like how she’s never stopped to think how off it is that she’s never been sick. That is, until she’s struck by a car and is exposed to extensive injuries. Injuries that seem to be healing faster than physically possible.

While recuperating in Spiker Biotech’s lush facilities, she meets Solo Plissken, a very attractive, if off-putting boy her age who spent his life at Spiker Biotech. Like Evening, he’s never questioned anything... until now. Solo drops hints to Evening that something isn’t right, and Emma-Rose may be behind it. Evening puts this out of her mind and begins her summer internship project: To simulate the creation of the perfect boy. With the help of Solo, Evening uncovers secrets so big they could change the world completely. --Goodreads

3 Stars

Review

I picked up Eve and Adam mostly because of the first line on the back of the book was “It all started with an apple”. Of all the corny lines in all the world, that one probably takes the cake, especially when used in a novel called Eve and Adam. However, the plot of the book has almost nothing to do with the Biblical story. It could just have easily been titled Juliet and Romeo and the novel would have worked just fine.

The book starts out with Evening, or Eve for short, looking at an apple while crossing the street and then being hit by a car (There you go, ladies and gentlemen. That was the entire role of the apple). Eve loses a leg but it’s regrown at the medical company founded by her mother, Terra Spiker.

But, of course, no young adult novel is ever complete without a boy. In this case, his name is Solo (say it with a Spanish accent, it sounds so much cooler). Solo is Terra Spiker’s ward, who she took in after his parents, her colleagues, died. He wants revenge on Terra Spiker because he blames her for his parents death. Eve has never heard of this really hot teenage boy and naturally is interested. To keep her away from Solo, her mother gives her the task of creating the perfect boy, Adam, on a computer program being used at Spiker Industries and even allows her friend Aislin to help her with it. However, Eve, along with Solo and Aislin, begin to uncover some strange (and illegal) experiments going on at Spiker Industries and Eve is faced with the fact that her mother may be really evil, not just a little mean as she had previously supposed.

While the overall plot of this book was really compelling, there were definitely a lot of problems. The biggest problem for me was Solo. Of all the revenge-seeking characters I have ever read about, Solo is the least angry. His entire attitude towards Terra Striker is: “Terra is such a horrible person but I don’t hate her, I simply strongly dislike her and besides, her daughter is so preeeetyyyyyy........”. In short, he is an incredibly ineffective angry character. Another problem was Aislin. Aislin is really, really screwed up. I understand why her character had to be so out there, but I think she could have been toned down just a little. And then there is Terra (SPOILER ALERT): she isn’t actually evil. At the very end of the novel, she turns out to be perfectly not-evil. It was like the authors got to the end and then realized that Terra being in jail really wasn’t going to work for the sequel and so they suddenly shifted the blame onto dead people.

And finally, the name of the sequel is perhaps the dumbest problem of all. It’s called (drumroll please)........Adam and Eve.

Eve and Adam has an interesting and compelling plot but the characters didn’t quite work. They were either too extreme or, in the case of Solo, not extreme enough.

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