Vitro

October 28, 2013
In her second novel, Khoury (Origin) introduces Sophie Crue, a 17-year-old with a mysterious past. Sophie’s childhood was spent on Guam where her biologist parents worked at a high-security laboratory on nearby Skin Island. When Sophie was seven, her father abruptly took her to the United States, leaving their lab behind and divorcing Sophie’s mother. Now, Sophie has received an email from her mother asking for her help in an unspecified emergency; without telling her father, she returns to her birthplace. There she discovers that no one on Guam will fly her to the forbidding island—no one except Jim Julien, her former childhood playmate, now grown to reckless adulthood. Sophie and Jim discover that Skin Island hides a dark experiment in genetics, one that some might kill to protect. Khoury’s prose is crisp and her primary characters compelling. The scientific mystery, a variation on the one at the core of Origin, is fascinating and serves as a believable critique of the dangers of scientific research motivated by profit. Ages 12–up. Agent: Lucy Carson, the Friedrich Agency.

October 15, 2013
Seventeen-year-old Sophie's mother works as a scientist on a secret island, so when the girl gets an emergency email, she rushes to join her. However, when she gets to Guam from the mainland U.S., no one there wants to fly Sophie to Skin Island, saying it's too dangerous. Finally, Sophie finds Jim, her childhood friend from when her family lived on Guam. When they land on Skin Island, they discover that the runway has been sabotaged, and Jim's plane is wrecked. While Jim tries to salvage his plane, Sophie is ushered to the lab, where she finds an unconscious girl who looks exactly like her. Knocked out, she awakens to discover she's been mistaken for Lux, a Vitro--a chip-implanted human grown from unneeded embryos and programmed to obey whomever she sees when she first awakes at age 17. Sophie plays along to learn more. When Jim arrives at the facility to retrieve Sophie, complications arise. Thereafter, the story becomes a shoot'em-up chase thriller, with poor Jim surviving at least two too many near-death experiences. Narrative perspective alternates among Sophie, Jim and Lux, following two plotlines until events converge. Khoury keeps the action moving with plenty of escapes and re-captures, gunfights and physical battles. If somewhat overlong and melodramatic, it's rarely dull, though overt moralizing mars the delivery. Ultimately, a pretty standard mad-scientist thriller. (Science fiction. 12 & up)

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February 1, 2014

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

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2013
Grades 7-10 Skin Island is the disturbing setting for Khoury's follow-up to Origin (2012), a novel that explores the ethical questions surrounding genetic engineering at a roller-coaster pace. After receiving a cryptic e-mail from her long-absent mother, 17-year-old Sophie Crue travels from Boston to Guam, the island of her birth, where she is reunited with childhood friend Jake. Now a pilot, he is the only person willing to take her to Skin Island. Sophie quickly realizes that the physician mother she always idolized is employed by the evil corporation that owns the island and that she isn't the one who begged Sophie to come. Khoury has written a violent, thought- provoking tale that grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go. Sophie is an appealing, if somewhat naive, heroine, battling over-the-top villains as she unravels the lies surrounding her mother's research and comes to understand the truly horrific implications of project Vitro. The novel ends with a tantalizing teaser for possible sequels and is sure to attract fans of Origin as well as Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy and Neal Shusterman's Unwind (2007).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2014
Responding to a message for help, Sophie travels to a remote island to track down her scientist mother. She discovers she has a genetically modified twin--the product of her mother's research. Despite alternating points of view, characters are flat stereotypes who act to advance the plot rather than from internal motivations. Plot twists and numerous explosions will keep some readers turning pages.

(Copyright 2014 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)