Eve & Adam

by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

After being in a car accident, a patient recovering in her mother's research facility is given the task of creating the perfect boy using detailed simulation technologies.

• ISBN13: 9781250034199
• Publish Date: 10 September 2013 (first published 1 October 2012)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: St Martin's Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[Chelsea]

This was a half and half book for me. I half liked it, and I half hated it.

What I liked about it: It was a really cool concept. This girl can make a boy however she wants him to look and act. She can even pick his personality. That’s pretty cool I think. I liked the plot most of the time too. It was kind of a quick pace but it suited the book.

What I didn’t like: First of all, the writing wasn’t as great as it could have been. It wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t amazing, which is what I expect in a book. Secondly, even though she can make whatever guy she wants, naturally she makes a really good-looking stupid guy. Very typical of her. Also I didn’t really like the characters all that much. They were all very predictable and bland. Usually I fall in love with at least one character but I only liked these ones.

Basically this book could have been so much more. There was so much potential to the story and then the authors killed it with a typical love triangle and a slutty best friend.

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

This review is also posted at Pages Unbound Book Reviews.

Notes on the Audio Book: The audio book features two narrators, with Jenna Lamia narrating Eve’s POV and Holter Graham narrating Solo’s.  Overall, I found both talented and enjoyed listening to them read.  Each gave distinct voices to other characters’ dialogue.  Lamia read nearly all of Eve’s part in a wondering voice, which was occasionally out of place (I would imagine lines like “My drawing still sucked” to be either deadpan or annoyed, not wondering), but overall the effect was a good one.  In fact, listening to Lamia probably made this book more enjoyable than it would have been if I had read it myself, as Eve has a tendency to state the obvious, but Lamia made it sound as if she were actually observing something new and interesting.  Lamia also gave Eve’s friend a shallow, annoying voice, which was also sometimes out of place (Does she really have to sneer innocuous lines like “Hello”?) but in most cases the voice fit the girl’s character.  Graham generally reads Solo as if he is more macho than he is, which also sounds appropriate to Solo’s personality. You can listen to a sample here.

The story: Eve and Adam is billed as a sci-fi book about the building of the perfect boy.  This has the potential to open all kinds of cans of worms: exploring what it means to be human, what it means to play God, how far science can really go, etc.  Readers expecting such heavy-handed themes will be disappointed.  Eve and Adam is really sci-fi light.  Creating Adam is almost a side plot; the real story focuses on Eve’s relationships, with her mother, her best friend, and the mysterious new boy Solo.  The main action plot is about Spiker Industries in general, hinting that the company may be engaging in illegal activities.

The problem is: The plot hints that the company may be breaking some laws.  The authors more than hint that Eve’s mother, CEO of the company, is evil incarnate because of this.  Now, readers would be right to be appalled by a corporation, and a woman, apparently okay with ignoring federal regulations and engaging in sketchy human testing practices (never specified what testing rules are skipped), but, in the end, Tara Spiker just lacks ethics.  She never comes across as scary.  (Although all the characters would tell you she is.  Total villain in heels.  Very scary.  But this is telling the reader—it is never adequately shown.  Even the “damning” photographic evidence Solo finds does not seem as horrific as he and Eve make it out to be.)

And, after all this, the ending takes away from much of the “evilness” the authors spend the entirety of the novel building up.  Things tie up a little too neatly to be satisfactory.

The other plots, the ones involving Eve’s relationships, are somewhat more interesting than the science/mystery plot, but they also tend to the one-dimensional.  Eve’s friend Aislin is a walking disaster—sex-obsessed, vulgar, a drunkard, and attached to a loser drug dealer boyfriend.  Much of Eve’s and Aislin’s time is spend dealing with said boyfriends' problems with gangs.  Although one wants to admire Eve for attempting to save Aislin from her own self-destructive behavior, one also wonders what the two possibly have in common and what Eve sees in her.  Her mother kind of has a point: Eve has terrible taste in friends.  Eve’s romance plot fares a little better, as Solo is probably more likeable to the general public (He is smart, resourceful, and not a drunken drug dealer.  Score!)  However, Eve and Solo do not really build a relationship. Somehow, several chapters in, they acquire one. And…then they are in one.  Although it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly is wrong with them, they probably will not be winning major awards for being a “swoon-worthy couple.”  They just lack chemistry.

On the style level, Eve and Adam is unique.  The descriptions and analogies tend to the unusual—in fact, tend to be the type of strange descriptions one associates with amateur creative writers trying very, very hard to sound profound or artistic.  When a nurse strips Eve to take a look at her injured leg and exclaims, “Oh my God!” at the sight, Eve reports to the reader, “She has laid my flesh bare, and her first thought is to call up a deity?”  Later in the novel, Solo’s thoughts include the phrase, “as your brain spins inside its bone cradle.”  A “bone cradle” sounds like a kenning the Anglo-Saxons could be proud of, but it is a little out of place in modern writing.  Obviously, this style can take getting used to, but most readers should become accustomed to within a few chapters, at which point it may even be possible to start appreciating it.  I, at least, am all in favor of kennings making a comeback.

Eve and Adam is entertaining, and it has a lot of great elements: dramatic run-ins with gangs, a crazy-cool super-lab compound, a romance, a computer program that allows anyone to build the perfect human.  However, it often lacks.  The characters and their relationships are a little flat, the science is not that hardcore, the major plotline does not seem as urgent or horrifying as the authors and characters want readers to believe.  The book might be worth taking a few hours to read, but I do not recommend it as one of my top reads.

Content Note:  Moderately heavy profanity.  References to sex.

[Angie]

Eve & Adam certainly starts out with a bang! Literally! I was hooked from the very first sentence. Although I was also quite disturbed since Eve's leg gets ripped clean off, but aside from that, this book is awesome. It's not perfect, but it's definitely a great, fun, unique read.

This is a rare case where I wished for Disappearing Parent Syndrome. Well, Eve's dad is dead, but her mom...OMG, she is Satan! I hated her immediately and just wanted her to shut up and go away. I guess being a bitch comes along with being an uber rich, uber important scientist though. I normally enjoy evil characters, but she had no known motivation, which made her just frustrating rather than interesting.

Solo, you are a creep! A super smart creep, but still a creep. His chapters are interesting, and he becomes less creepy as the story moves forward. At first his connection to the Adam Project isn't clear at all, and I couldn't figure out why he was so adamant about bringing Terre Spiker down (aside from her being a crazy bitch of course). But all is revealed close to the end, and it's kind of a shock!

Aislin, the BFF, is a total mess and I suppose she was the catalyst for the big reveal about Eve's medical situation. However, her plot in general was really random and felt out of place. It all involves her gangbanger boyfriend and other thugs running lose in San Francisco and money drops. By the end I failed to see the point of her plot. As a character though, I really like Aislin. She's the opposite of Eve in almost every way and provided some great comic relief.

I don't have anything to say about Eve, so let's get to the plot. I loved it! I am a huge fan of science in books, so of course I was completely engrossed in this one! Genetics isn't my strong suit, but I understand enough. Is what Terra's company doing possible? I have no clue, but it sure makes for an entertaining read! Oh, and of course creating the perfect male specimen is all kinds of fun, too!

All in all, Eve and Adam is a super fun, sci-fi book. I love the science and the technology, and the possibilities that this book presents. It's a very fast read, and I'd recommend it!

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[jeannamichel]

First: a car accident and a hospital that fears Eve may never be able to run again. Her mother, Terra, is a significant character in the science world and when she insists on bringing Eve, straight out of surgery to Terra’s own science facility, there is no questioning. Second: a recovery room and boredom. To quench Eve’s boredom, her mother gives her a science experiment to play with: Eve has to create the perfect boy. Eve creates Adam.

I wasn’t sure I was going to like this book. It sounded like a thoughtful concept, and one which would be great to read about if done the right way. Well these two authors wrote it in exactly the right way because I loved every minute of it.

Eve and Adam was constant action which didn’t let up until the very last page. I was surprised at how fast I flew through the book, wanting to know more. I thought it was going to have more of a science element which I wasn’t going to like but as much as most of the book took place in a science facility, science was not a big issue. Science is not my favorite subject in the world and Eve and Adam stuck to the minimum: talking about genetics and the cliché of creepy objects in jars.

It was amazing writing and grabbed the reader along for the ride. Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate worked together and wrote a masterpiece of both a book and a boy named Adam. As much as Adam was gorgeous in every possible way, I loved how Grant and Applegate took the time to sneak in a few moral messages for the kids. Perfect boys don’t always mean perfect everythings.

The characters were memorable. However, both narrations of Eve and Solo sounded too similar. The only way I could differentiate the two was by looking at the name in the beginning of the chapter. However, this may have been done to show how perfect they were for each other. As much as their narrations were similar, their decisions were different which made them both unique in their own ways.

The ending was adorable but too short. I felt like the whole thing was over too quickly. I think this book has a little bit for everyone but if you are especially into science fiction, you’ll want to check this one out.

[Kelly]

I really liked the concept, but it was too short a read. If only it could have been elaborated further and possibly been a successful series. Just felt too rushed and a bit shallow.

[Ashley]

More reviews at booknook - Young Adult book reviews

Me, pre-reading: "Please be good, please be good, please be good!" Seriously. I said that out loud to myself. This was one of my most anticipated fall 2012 novels.

This book has so much personality. Every word that comes off the page is some kind of hilarious wit, humour, or sarcasm, and I absolutely loved it! It was so entertaining, and so not what I expected from a dystopian sci-fi novel. Those are usually epic, but pretty serious. This book was so playful! All the characters were hilarious in their own way. Evening and Solo were pretty similar — both hilariously snarky and independent. Evening's best friend, Aislin, was a hilarious teenager with absolutely no censor! She's more of a bad girl — into sex and alcohol — but she's a fiercely loyal friend and a great character. And Evening's mom Terra Spiker, a.k.a. Ice Queen Bitch or "Terror Spiker," is funny in her own bitchy, scary rich CEO woman way.

In many ways, this book read more like a contemporary novel than a sci-fi dystopian. I think it was because of the very playful nature of the dialogue. I felt like I was just reading about a funny, rich teenager's life while she embarked on a high-tech science project. I estimate that this book takes place maybe 10 years in the future. We’re never given an exact date but it’s far enough in the future that USBs are becoming obsolete, but not so far that the world is unrecognizable. Society, the government, and culture all seem nearly exactly the same.

Although I wasn’t expecting a realistic sci-fi that felt like a contemporary, I still enjoyed the book immensely. It was very entertaining, playful, and was a very quick read. Although perhaps you could say it was almost too quick. This isn't the most detailed of books and it touches on a lot of different things, without going into extreme detail. That made it easy to read, but perhaps lacking if you're a stickler for detail and world-building.

What's cool about this book is that it dips a lot into stereotypes and morals. As Evening is creating the perfect man—her Adam—she has to decide every single detail. And of course she ends up creating a stereotypically handsome, perfectly muscled man. It's just kind of interesting to watch her thought process and see her decide which features to add or exclude. Once the action picks up in the novel, we get a lot of hints and messages about morals, and it really tied into our society today. In the news today, we hear about all these things like cloning and genetic modification, and this book talks a lot about the morality of that. Can you go too far with science? That's what made the book feel really real to me. Eve and Adam introduces science that I could imagine becoming real some day (or maybe less extreme versions).

Eve and Adam was extremely enjoyable, and fast-paced, and once again, it had the best personality EVER! Every single character was amazing in a different way and I was laughing all the time. They're so hilarious and that's really what made this a five star book for me. The story and science fiction elements were interesting, but they definitely took the backseat; the colourful dialogue is what really stood out.

I almost feel like I'm not sure what will happen in the next book (titled Adam and Eve) since there wasn't a cliffhanger, but I can't wait to find out!

I literally felt like I wanted to quote every other page of this book because there were so many lines that cracked me up! Here are a few:

I sit with my elbows on my knees, trying to hunch my shoulders forward a little. I have good shoulders, might as well reveal them. I know she's checking me out. Fair enough, because I'm checking her out.
"Ah ahhh ahhhh!"
Eve cries out suddenly. She's in pain. Bad pain. So it's possible she's not really checking me out.
—ARC of Eve and Adam, Page 12

Things I Think About, Exhibit A:
How I got a B+ on my oral report in bio [...]. I'm pretty sure Ms. Montoya dropped my grade because of my intro: "Boys have nipples." Perhaps this was news to her.
It was a risky ploy, sure, but when it's second period and you're the first speaker and the Red Bull has only ignited a handful of brain cells, you do what you have to do.
There were twenty kids in the room. When I moved to the front to tie my iPad to the projector, I'd say I had a total of eight eyeballs out of a possible forty watching me.
I delivered my opening line, and thirty-nine eyeballs were trained on me. Jennifer has one lazy eye, so I was never going to get all forty.
—ARC of Eve and Adam, Pages 16-17

Gently she begins to cut away the tape and gauze and pressure mesh. It doesn't hurt, but it doesn't make me happy, either.
"Oh my god!" she says.
She has laid the flesh bare and her first thought is to call up a deity.
—ARC of Eve and Adam, Page 32