Thirteen-year-old Eva wakes up in the hospital, and she’s unable to remember anything since the picnic on the beach. Her mother starts to explain, a traffic accident, a long coma… But there is something, Eva senses, that she’s not being told. There is a price she must pay to be alive at all. What have they done with their amazing medical techniques trying to save her?

The world population is growing. People need more and more land for crops and cities, so most of the animals die out. The great wild jungles are gone, and the animals have vanished.  First, all the big animals like elephants, gorillas, whales, and dolphins disappear, but chimps are different. They are special because they are so close to humans. It is worth keeping chimps alive for research to be done that can’t be done on humans themselves.  

Eva’s parents have allowed her to be a part in this new experiment. But how would it feel to wake up from a horrific accident in a body that is not even your own? She wakes up to later to discover that her mind has been relocated to the body of a chimpanzee. Will she ever be able to see her own face, her bright blue eyes again, her dark hair? Eva struggles to find the right way to move, to eat, and to adjust being in a different body. She tries her best to accept who she is and who she will become.

In the second part of the novel, word is spreading about Eva’s experiences and how successful and quickly she recovered and how happy she is now with her new lifestyle. But now the press is taking advantage with that. On top of all the struggles that Eva is facing, she discovers how the press is taking advantage of other chimpanzees in the research facility, how the cruelties are being performed. Eva also finds out that two other similar surgery attempts were performed but failed. Eva decides to come up with a plan to save the lives of the chimpanzees.

This novel is amazingly written; it takes the reader on this wild and a little scary adventure.It’s scary to think of what experiments people did on animals. People were torturing and killing animals.

This is a moving and thoughtful story. Dickinson did a great job describing Eva’s experience of being a chimp. I love how Eva tries to help other Chimpanzees and how she comes up with a plan to save their lives. It’s a wonderful story. This book is highly reccomend to the ages of twelve and up.