She Treads Softly: The New One

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

The New One

The New One by Evie Green
3/28/23; 400 pages
Penguin

The New One by Evie Green is a very highly recommended family drama merged with a science fiction thriller. This is an excellent novel!

Tamsyn and Ed live with their rebellious 14 year-old daughter Scarlett in a camper van and they are doing all they can to make ends meet. Scarlett is rebellious, angry, defiant, moody, and foul mouthed. Both Tamsyn and Ed have had enough. their marriage is on the brink of imploding and Scarlett is impossible. Then the unthinkable happens. Scarlett has an accident and is on life support in the hospital. Everything seems hopeless and the insurance will only last for a limited time.

Then a representative from a medical trial representing VitaNova offers them a life line. Scarlett will be moved into their facility and cared for without any cost to them. All they have to do is allow the team to reanimated (clone) a version of their daughter in Switzerland. The couple will be provided a luxury apartment in Geneva, Switzerland, and have all their financial needs provided for them. Then the reanimated version of Scarlett (Sophie, using Scarlett's middle name) will live with them.

This is an absolutely un-put-downable family drama/sci fi thriller. There are several twists in the narrative that I was not expecting and they totally surprised and startled me. The New One was impossible to read fast enough and the page number at the end stunned me because the pages flew by so quickly. The revelations, twists, and turns in the direction of the narrative kept coming, disturbing and shocking me with each new disclosure.

The writing is exceptional and the narrative is carefully plotted. Each new twist in the narrative changes what you think you know, providing maximum reading pleasure. This is a novel that it is best to read with little information and leave the experience in the capable hands of the Green, the author, in order to fully appreciate it how expertly it is crafted and plotted. If you enjoy thought-provoking science fiction and family dramas this will be an automatic must read for you.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin via NetGalley.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.