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NOBEL GENES by Rune Michaels

NOBEL GENES

by Rune Michaels

Pub Date: Aug. 10th, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1259-0
Publisher: Atheneum

Teenage years are devoted to self-discovery. For a young boy who has always been told that he was conceived in a petri dish from genes donated by a Nobel Prize–winning father, living up to his dangerously unstable mother’s expectations is difficult at best. As this taut and disturbing story unfolds, the young protagonist learns some unwelcome truths while coming to the conclusion that who he will be is something only he can determine. The unnamed boy's present-tense narration is quite effective in describing his panic as he witnesses his mother overdose—again—and struggles to conscript first his mother's counterculture tenant and then a little-known neighbor into maintaining the fiction of a functioning household to avoid being taken by child welfare. It is significantly less successful in conveying the series of revelations that leads him to self-knowledge; in particular, the final reveal, communicated as it is in a lucid dream, seems downright silly, if harrowing. (Fiction. 12-16)