I'm thinking of an apple when the streetcar hits and my leg severs and my ribs crumble and my arm is no longer an arm but something unrecognizable, wet and red.
— The book's opening line
Eve and Adam is a collaboration between Creator Couple Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant. It focuses on Evening Spiker, who gets in a car crash that threatens to kill her... except that she's mysteriously fine after a few days. Terra, her mother and the owner of the hospital where Eve is staying, wants to keep her in the hospital for longer, and so to keep Eve from being bored, her mother gives her a project: to genetically engineer the perfect boy, Adam. The book is told in a dual perspective between Eve and Solo Plissken, who worked for Eve's mom at the hospital ever since his parents were killed in a car crash. He knows that there's more to the project than keeping Eve busy, and with her help, he uncovers some horrifying secrets of the hospital...
The book is told from the perspective of Eve, whose chapters are written by Applegate, and Solo (as well as Adam, who appears halfway through the novel), whose chapters are written by Grant. It is notable for having an unbelievable amount of references to sex.
There is a prequel called Love Sucks and Then You Die on Amazon
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Eve and Adam provides examples of:
- Accidental Pervert: Played with. At one point, Eve has to change her shirt in Solo's presence. So she turns her back to him... only to realize too late that she was standing in front of a mirror. Although Aislin assures us that Solo didn't look, it sure would've fit his personality to take notice.
- Action Survivor: The entire main cast.
- Adam and/or Eve: Eve designs Adam, the first artificial human.
- Adults Are Useless: That, or evil.
- Affectionate Nickname: EV for Eve.
- All Men Are Perverts/All Women Are Lustful: Not all, but a lot more than you'd expect from the average young adult novel. Justified in that a lot of the women are perverts and a lot of the men are lustful, too. How about we just go with Everything Is About Sex and leave it at that?
- Anti-Villain: Terra.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Eve's genetic healing powers.
- Artistic License – Biology: It comes up surprisingly rarely, but there is one place where it's a problem: it's mentioned that Eve was genetically engineered as a young child. This would've meant that every one of her billions of cells would've had to been altered, and there would've been no way to do it quickly enough so that she wouldn't know.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Eve's narration tends to go from one thing to another really quickly, particularly in the beginning when she was badly injured, whereas Solo and Adam's voices were much more grounded to one topic at a time.
- Auto Erotica: As said in the Amazon blurb for Love Sucks and Then You Die, Aislin "thinks true love exists in the back seat of a used Honda".
- Badass Bookworm: Solo.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Between Solo and Eve. And between everyone and Adam.
- Beta Couple: Aislin and Adam are shaping up to be this.
- Better Living Through Evil: SpikerFarm's goal is to provide this for everyone.
- Big Brother Is Watching: There are cameras everywhere in SpikerFarm - everywhere, except the bathrooms. It wasn't too big a problem at first, since Solo had the computer skills to hack into the camera systems, but once SpkerFarm employees found out what he was doing and locked him out of his computer, it became a much bigger problem.
- Biopunk: There's a pretty big focus on genetic engineering, obviously.
- Child Prodigy: Solo is better with computers than some actual adults. Justified in that he was around people with the same skills since he was ten.
- Covers Always Lie: The apple featured on the American edition? It's seen exactly once, in the very first scene, and never mentioned again.
- Deceased Parents Are the Best: Both of Solo's parents are dead, and Eve's father is dead.
- Designer Babies: There are genetic modifications to make a child heal faster, and some characters had it from birth. There is also the ability to genetically engineer whole people. Leading to the titular Adam.
- Disappeared Dad: Eve's father.
- Distracted by the Sexy: The characters are known for thinking about sex during very serious moments and action sequences. And it happens to everyone who meets Adam.
- The Drag-Along: Aislin.
- Even the Guys Want Him: Adam.
- Evil Genius: Terra is a subversion.
- Expy: Solo is pretty reminiscent of Jobs, with a hint of Computer Jack. The style of his narration is also pretty similar to Marco's.
- Flipping the Bird: At one point, Solo is tied up by SpikerFarm workers who try to make him give them the password to his computer. He gives them a long, thirty-two character password... that deletes the contents of the computer and displays a middle finger.
- For the Lulz: SpikerFarm could've easily tested the Adam Project themselves, but they gave it to Eve instead, just because she was bored.
- Geek: Solo.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: Terra arranged to have Eve genetically engineered so that she could heal much, much faster than others. It ends up saving her life.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: While the series looks like it could have a predictable message about the evils of science, it's a lot more thoughtful than that; Eve's mom has done some pretty horrible things, but she's saved more lives than she's ruined.
- Healing Factor: Eve has it due to her genetic engineering.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Eve and Aislin.
- Humanoid Abomination/Body Horror: A few were engineered at SpikerFarm.
- Ignore the Fanservice: At one point, Solo has to examine Eve's entire leg to look at how the injuries healed. This required Eve to completely pull down her pants in front of Solo - and in a bathroom, no less. We get the scene from Solo's narration, and he talks about trying to ignore the fact that Eve is in her panties.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Adam comes to life. And he narrates. It's pretty much impossible to go into the book without knowing this, given the chapters having a Protagonist Title for the POV character of that chapter.
- Lighter and Softer: Than anything else the duo has written, other than Making Out. Well, it's lighter, anyway. No one has any illusions that it's any less edgy than the other stuff - if anything, it's more.
- Living with the Villain: Eve obviously lives with her mom, the resident Evil Genius.
- The Load: Adam.
- Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: Eve, although the mad scientist is a woman, for once.
- Magic from Technology: Eve's healing abilities derived from genetic engineering.
- Meaningful Name: Solo has been alone ever since his parents died in a car crash.
- And, of course, the whole Adam and Eve thing.
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Money, Dear Boy: Both authors, according to Word of God. Here's how Grant puts it in a school visit:Grant: So, Jean Fiewell [editor of Animorphs] comes to us and says, "Hey, do you want to write a book together again?" And of course, we say, "Oh, God no. We don't want any piece of that, because things are peaceful now, life is good in our house." And then she said the words that would change our opinion on this, which were, "I'll pay you a lot of money." And we said, "Oh, okay." - Mr. Fanservice: Adam.
- Name and Name: Eve and Adam.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: "I try to speak. "Unh ohn," I say. Yep. Can't pronounce F with a tube in your mouth."
- Never Trust a Trailer: The back cover of the American edition hilariously misrepresents the book by painting Solo as nothing more than a side character and ending with this:Using an amazingly detailed simulation, Eve starts building a boy from the ground up. Eve is creating Adam. And he will be just perfect... won’t he?
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: When the scientists capture Solo and want to get into his computer, they ask him for the password. So he gives them a long, thirty-two character combination... that blanks the computer's memory, making it useless.
- Non-Action Big Bad: The SpikerFarm scientists.
- Official Couple: Eve and Solo.
- Only a Flesh Wound: Invoked; despite the fact that Eve is almost killed by the car that hits her, she's better in a few days. Justified once we find out that Eve was genetically engineered to be able to heal well.
- Only One Name: Adam.
- Ordinary High-School Student: Eve, at first. Also, Aislin.
- Parents as People: Terra, if nothing else, cares deeply about her daughter-the revelation she's genuinely that well-intentioned is a big plot twist.
- Playful Hacker: Solo, having been around computers since his parents died, is incredibly smart with them, often hacking for plot-related and non-plot-related reasons.
- Plot Twist: Terra Spiker is painted as the villain in the book by Solo, and is hinted to have killed Solo's parents and orchestrated the human experiments. In reality, Terra Spiker, while cold and bitchy, wasn't behind any of the experiments, but rather Solo's own parents were. Terra Spiker had them shut down, and only agreed to the genetic modification of Eve to save her life.
- Present Tense Narrative
- Protagonist Title: Each chapter is named after its POV Character.
- Rape as Drama: A bunch of adult scientists joke about wanting to have sex with Eve, a teenager.
- Reluctant Mad Scientist: Terra turns out to be an okay person, if a bit reckless and unempathetic. She only experimented on Eve because it was the only way she could think of to save her life.
- Running Over the Plot: The first chapter ends when Eve is hit by a car, and that's how she enters the hospital that holds most of the plot.I'm thinking of an apple when the streetcar hits and my leg severs and my ribs crumble and my arm is no longer an arm but something unrecognizable, wet and red.
- Sarcasm-Blind: Adam.
- Saved by the Phlebotinum: Eve's healing ability saves her life early on in the novel.
- Science Is Bad: Averted, thank god. Even though Terra and SpikerFarm have done some bad things, they've also saved a bunch of lives.
- Shirtless Scene: Adam gets one when some female doctors (as well as Steve) pretend that Adam needs a checkup and make him take off his shirt so they can check his heartbeat.
- Eve at one point talks about a report she made in which she opened by saying, "Boys have nipples. Why is this?" She then proceeds to show a picture of a shirtless man that was 'sure to hold the attention of the nine straight girls and one gay boy in the room.'
- Shout-Out: The Logan Serum is a one to Logan's Run, another novel with super health and sexual themes.
- Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Solo is mentioned as nothing more than a mysterious boy on the back of the American edition, and Aislin isn't mentioned at all.
- Slut-Shaming: Terra does it some to Aislin, but it's justified in that Terra doesn't really know her, she's not really supposed to be a good guy, and based on what we know about Aislin, it's not at all true.
- Supporting Protagonist: Adam. He doesn't actually do a whole lot, since he's so new to the world.
- Switching P.O.V.: Starts off with just Eve and Solo, then it adds Adam about halfway in.
- Title Drop:
- For Eve and Adam... Over... and over... and over again...
- For Love Sucks and Then You Die: It's Eve and Aislin's "suggestion they'd submitted to the dance committee".
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Aislin and Eve respectively.
- Trope Maker: The authors credit themselves with creating, as they put it, "Biblical sci-fi rom-com thriller."
- Urban Fantasy: The story has a strong focus on genetic engineering, but it takes place in San Francisco.
- Use Your Head: In Love Sucks and Then You Die, when Eve's date to the dance tried to kiss her, he got a:head butt to the nose
- Utopia Justifies the Means: SpikerFarm's justification for what they do.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We never find out what happens to Maddox after being shot twice in the stomach. He's rushed to hospital, and doctors describe his condition as "hopeful", but aren't entirely sure if he'll live or not. This is never elaborated on, and we have no idea if he recovered or died.
- Womanliness as Pathos: Terra Striker is the cold, rather bitchy mother of the first protagonist, Evening, who basically adopts the second protagonist and Evening's love interest, Solo. Early into the story, her attitude and controlling nature have everyone assuming that she's the mastermind behind the entire story but it turns out that she's not. While she is definitely not blameless, most of her actions were done out of genuine concern for her daughter. And it's also revealed that she tried to stop the events that led up to the story. Terra is basically the axis that drives the entire plot forward and brings the characters together.
- World of Snark: Everyone in this series is snarky, other than Adam.
- You Are Grounded!: Terra tries pretty hilariously to keep Eve in the hospital.
- Younger Than They Look: Adam is, when we first meet him, only a couple of minutes old, but Eve designed him to be about sixteen, her own age.
