Vitro

Gr 7 Up—After receiving a mysterious emergency email from her scientist mother, Sophie Crue returns to her childhood home in Guam in search of Skin Island where, for years, her mother has been involved in a top-secret project. Only one pilot is willing to fly her to the remote island, her childhood best friend, Jim. Following a terrifying crash landing, the pair discovers that Sophie's mother is part of an organization that has appropriated unwanted human test tube embryos and has been raising these Vitros in incubators to young adulthood for the past 17 years, programming them as skilled laborers and coding them to imprint on the first person they see upon awakening. One of those Vitros is Sophie's twin sister, Lux. Origin (Penguin, 2012) author Khoury has created a novel that addresses questions about how far experimentation can ethically go and at what point experimental subjects become more human than their creators. Fast-paced chapters are told from Julien's, Sophie's, and Lux's points of view, which keep readers in suspense until the satisfying conclusion. In this refreshing offering, Khoury follows in the footsteps of sci-fi giants Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Anne McCaffrey.—Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK