Review: Lucy

I got this book from my mother, who had gone on and on about it to me during the summer and again at Christmas and finally mailed her copy to  me earlier this month. She thought I would like it because the main character is an anthropologist, a primatologist to be exact, and it is about evolution and hybrid species and things of that nature.

She was spot on. One of my favorite canceled shows was one called Prey that starred Debra Messing. It was very much like this book, only not. In the tv show a new species of human has evolved and they are bent on wiping us out just like Homo Sapien Sapien dominated and Homo Floresiensis and Neanderthalensis did not survive.

Lucy, by Laurence Gonzales, isn't so much about a new breed dominating, though. It's about a new hybrid species that was bred by an unethical and maybe a little mental old primatologist. He made her from himself and a genetically altered (so as to make the breeding produce something) bonobo.

Creepy, no?

I found the book fairly fast paced, perhaps too fast paced. Which is to say,  I loved the initial crisis and I loved the part about Lucy being in crisis, but I was not so enamored with how the author handled the year she lived with Jennifer up to that point. It felt short changed. I wanted more detail on how a girl who was raised partially by her human father and partially by her bonobo mother would interact and change and struggle in contemporary America. And he gives you some of that, but it was as if he thought it would be too boring if he gave us a little more.

Maybe it's that I sat through all of those long narratives about a certain teenage wizard and his pals and all of the lesser conflicts and interactions and back story that really help to pull together the main characters into a stronger set of heroes and villans. But I think Gonzales could have used some of that to demonstrate why Amanda would just drop everything for Lucy. Or how Jennifer evolved into a parent when she had no desire to be one prior to discovering Lucy at the beginning. And I was more than a little interested in what would happen between Lucy and her wrestling partner and was not satisfied by the memories given after-the-fact.

The book is good, despite the poor Amazon reviews. I recommend it for sure if you can stand to read about what the government might do to a hybrid human if they had one in their grasp. The politics and cruel science represented are frighteningly believable and I have to admit to being a little squicked at one point.

Definitely a good read.