Eva

Eva is the book's central character and protagonist, from the beginning a strange, sometimes disturbing, often curiosity-triggering, scientifically engineered blend of human being and chimpanzee. The novel affords only very brief glimpses of who Eva was and what she was like (young, pretty, athletic, outspoken, playful) before the accident that put her life in jeopardy and the surgery that enabled that life to continue. Several of those aspects of character and personality continue to manifest post-integration, even while she struggles to find a balance and/or continuity between her basic human nature, her individual identity, and the animal nature to which the first two have essentially become grafted. Ultimately, though, what is particularly interesting and/or engaging about Eva, as an individual and as the central character in a narrative, is the way she undergoes a personal transformation as the result of her physical one - not the...