My dad gave me this book when I was a kid, and the opening chapters always stuck with me: a teenage girl waking out of a coma following a horrific accident to find that her mind has been relocated to the body of a chimpanzee. It's a seriously haunting premise. I couldn't remember the rest of the story, though, so I recently reread it to see if it was still good. And it's wonderful. Set in a mundanely nightmarish future, in which the natural world has been all but destroyed by human industry, and most wildlife is extinct, and every bit of space on Earth—physical, virtual, and conceptual—is controlled by corporate interests, this variation of Kafka's Metamorphosis imagines the breakdown of modern humanity and humanism with a kind of fearlessness uncommon in young adult literature. Eva's father is a chimp researcher, and Eva herself has a precocious understanding of and comfort with chimps before her accident. As she comes to consciousness in her new body (that of the chimpanzee Kelly), Eva survives only because she understands that she must learn to be a new kind of creature—not human, not ape, and not something simply "in-between," but an entirely new category that she must create by consciously living it:

You couldn't just invade a chimp body and take it over with your human mind, like a hero in a history book—you'd never get to be whole that way. Eva's human neurons might have copied themselves into Kelly's brain, but as Dad had said, that left a sort of connection, an interface, a borderland where human ended and chimp began. You couldn't live like that, with a frontier in you like a wall, keeping your selves apart. The only way to become whole was to pull the wall down, to let the other side back in, to let it invade in its turn, up into the human side, the neurons remembering their old paths, twining themselves in among the human network, until both sides made a single pattern. A new pattern, not Eva, not Kelly—both but one.

In addition to taking on complex questions of identity with energy and intelligence, Eva offers wonderful descriptions of processes of socialization, both human and chimp. It reminded me of all the things I loved best about books when I was a kid: naturalist research, tales of survival, precocious kids analyzing the nutty adult world around them and strategizing their escape. And apes. Fierce, fuzzy, tantrum-throwing, game-playing, bug-eating apes.