SKINNED

Beautiful, talented, wealthy and above all headstrong, 17-year-old Lia Kahn knows who she is and what she wants, until she is severely injured in a car accident that destroys her body but spares her mind. Though she’s a candidate for a highly controversial procedure, Lia’s parents opt to preserve her mental capacity, including her memories and personality, by swapping her destroyed flesh-and-blood body for a machine model, which although it looks human does not breathe, eat or even need to sleep. Set in a well-drawn future world highly reminiscent of M.T. Anderson’s Feed (2002), this novel finds Lia reentering her familiar life to learn quickly that as a “mech-head” she’s subject to enormous prejudice, from the religious “faithers,” her popular friends and even within her own family—which causes her to seek the answers to serious and painful question about her existence. Futuristically blurring the boundaries of life and death, this text intimately tackles tough ethical topics, including faith, identity, suicide and genetic engineering, through blunt dialogue and realistic characters. (Fiction. YA)