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Searching... Newberg Public Library | TEEN DICKINSON | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
After a terrible accident, a young girl wakes up to discover that she has been given the body of a chimpanzee.
Author Notes
Peter Dickinson was born in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia on December 16, 1927. He served in the British Army before receiving a B.A. in English literature from King's College, Cambridge in 1951. He was an assistant editor and reviewer for Punch Magazine for seventeen years. His first book, The Weathermonger, was published in 1968. He has written over 50 books for adults and young adults. His works for adults include Death of a Unicorn, Skeleton-in-Waiting, Perfect Gallows, The Yellow Room Conspiracy, and Some Deaths Before Dying. His works for young adults include The Iron Lion, The Ropemaker, Angel Isle, and In the Palace of the Khans. He has won several awards including the Boston Globe Horn Book Award in 1989 for Eva, the Carnegie Medal in 1979 for Tulku and in 1980 for City of Gold, the Whitbread Children's Prize for Tulku, and the Crime Writer's Golden Dagger for Skin Deep in 1968 and A Pride of Heroes in 1969. In 2009, he was awarded the OBE for services to literature. He died after a brief illness on December 16, 2015 at the age of 88.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8-12-- Set in the overcrowded world of the future, Eva is an excellent science fiction/fantasy story with a strong heroine and well-drawn supporting cast. Eva, 13, is in an irreversible coma after a car accident. In a previously untried procedure, scientists transfer her memory and brain patterns to a new body--that of a chimpanzee, Kelly. Kelly's instincts and subconscious memories stay with Eva. The problems that arise as Eva/Kelly adapts to her new body and feelings and as people adapt to her as a new entity make an intriguing story line. Eva eventually goes to live as a chimpanzee on an experimental island devoid of mankind. Whether her introduction of human knowledge to the chimps will produce a new species is hinted at but not confirmed. The adults and the chimps in Eva's life are secondary characters but not without impact. Each chimp has a definite personality. The eerie tone that is set early is not sustained throughout the book, but the compelling need to know what happens to Eva/Kelly will keep readers captivated to the end. A well-written, entertaining look into the future. --Kathryn Havris, Mesa Public Library, Ariz. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following a terrible car crash, Eva, 14, awakens from a strange dream and finds herself in a hospital bed. Medical science, in this book's future setting, has allowed doctors to pull her functioning brain from her crushed body and put it into the able body of a chimpanzee. With the aid of a voice synthesizer, she communicates with others and adjusts to her new body; because her father is a scientist who has always worked among the chimps (who have been crowded by the massive human population out of any semblance of a natural world, and into iron and steel jungles), Eva is comfortable with her new self. She takes on the issue of animal rights, setting up (with the help of others, of course) an elaborate scheme to release chimps back into the last of the wild. Years later, that is where she dies. The story is riveting from the outset, especially as Dickinson details the ways in which Eva's life is saved, and the progress of her recovery. As the story becomes more political, the author loses sight of some compelling questions he has sewn into the opening pages: Who owns her--the chimp's owner, her parents, herself? Eva's human aspect becomes a device that allows her to help other chimps survive, but is otherwise unquestioned. The drama is no less suspenseful for that, but it is less satisfying. Ages 12-16. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A gifted fantasy-writer combines a dystopian future with an imaginative exercise: describing what it would be like to be the hybrid that results when the brain-patterns and memory of a dying girl are transferred into the brain of a chimpanzee. Even for 13-year-old Eva, who has always played with the chimps in the reserve managed by her scientist father, waking from a long coma to find herself in a chimp's body is a harrowing experience; both she and her parents are forced to reexamine their concepts of self and love and how they are related to body as well as mind. Her mother would like to treat her like the old Eva; ironically, it is her less sympathetic, more analytical father who becomes a reluctant ally when Eva (who has kept her sanity by understanding that she must make peace with her chimp body as well as her human mind) leads her chimp companions in an escape back to a natural habitat--a rarity in a world with crippling overpopulation and few surviving creatures other than man. Dedicating his book to Jane Goodall, Dickinson incorporates a lot of fascinating lore on chimp behavior into his carefully reasoned narrative; his depiction of a terminally overcrowded society centered on ""shapers"" (3D TV)--and where mass suicide is a symptom of the boredom that leads to despair--is chilling. Sure to entertain, but thought-provoking as well. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Eva wakes up in the hospital to discover that the doctors have saved her life by transferring her neuron memory to the brain of a female chimpanzee; she soon realizes that to be whole she must integrate her human consciousness with her chimp nature and instincts. A novel that transcends the science-fiction genre, raising important moral questions.