Product Description

The picnic on the beach is Eva's last memory. As she lies in the hospital bed while her mother explains about the accident and the coma, Eva senses there is something they are not telling her--a price she must pay to be alive.20,000 print.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192977 in Books
• Published on: 1990-10-01
• Released on: 1990-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780440207665
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“Unusually rewarding and challenging.”—Booklist, Starred

“Sure to entertain, but thought-provoking as well.”—Kirkus Reviews, Pointer


From the Paperback edition.

Review
“Unusually rewarding and challenging.”—Booklist, Starred

“Sure to entertain, but thought-provoking as well.”—Kirkus Reviews, Pointer

Customer Reviews

An unsettling "far out" read
This story opens as 13-year-old Eva wakes up in a hospital bed to find that she has been seriously injured in a car crash and has been in a coma for months. As she slowly regains consciousness, she experiences strange sensations and dreams until she learns that her life has been saved with an unprecedented medical procedure in which her memories have been implanted into the brain and body of a chimpanzee. Eva is set in the future, in a dystopian urban world in which humans have destroyed most of the world and are isolated in super high rises and fed a steady stream of television. Eva's father is a researcher of captive, habituated chimps with whom Eva was essentially raised. Eva's operation and recovery were sponsored by a manufacturer of juice products, who contractually own her and exploit her to advertise their products. As she recovers and adjusts to her new life, she begins to identify with the chimp part of herself and relates to the other chimps, leading her to resist her handlers and her parents and campaign for greater autonomy for herself and her fellow chimps. Eva eventually becomes the poster child for animal rights activists and a figure to whom many people look as an inspiration as the human race is degenerating. Eventually, like her Biblical namesake, Eva is sent to an Edenic paradise with a troop of chimps to teach them to live in the wild and be televised worldwide for the entertainment of humans. As events transpire, Eva and her troop are left possibly to repopulate the planet and begin the evolution of the human race again. The story raises all kinds of existential questions about what makes us who we are, what is our relationship with animals, and what are our responsibilities to nature and the environment. These thought-provoking themes are balanced by suspenseful action and well-developed characters (including the chimps). With the highly introspective nature of this story and the slow and mysterious revelation of the plot, this is a challenging read. Eva is a terrific book for adolescents asking their own big questions and learning how to find their own opinions and voices.

What a good book
I read this book for a boook report and i dont really like reading books. I usually end up finishing them up the weekend before there due. But as soon as I started to read this i couldn't put it down it was sooooooo good! My mind just got caught up into all the text. If you really like exciting books i suggest this book because it just traps you inside and you cant get out. if you read this book you wont want to put it down!

Eva! The one and only.
This book would have to be one of the best books i have ever read. Which isn't many. It explaines how a young girl was put into a chimps body and had to live like that for the rest of her life. She had to lern how to use the chimps body to move and comunicate with other chimps. This book is kinda like the kind of book that is boaring in the begining but is like "wow" at the end. I recamend this book to anyone who doesn't like to read. It will open up your mind and make you think about all the different storys and feelings there really are out in the world that is all writen on paper. But to expearience them "you" have to make the efert.