Monday is review day, and today it’s a YA Science Fiction Review of the Girl on Fire Trilogy by Sue Wyshynski.
The Butterfly Code is the first book in this well-written, entertaining and interesting trilogy. It’s a story about genetic engineering where a group of people were injected with an experimental serum designed to make them immortal. They didn’t give their approval at the time because they were unconscious and would have died without the serum. Though the serum gave them superpowers and immortality, it came with the curse of extraordinary pain every 4 months or so when their body went into melt down and rebuilt itself from scratch – hence the ‘Butterfly Code’ and ‘Girl on Fire’ titles. Aeris’s mother spent her life trying to find a cure for this unfortunate side effect and did, but she died before she could share her discovery with the group. Due to a deadly accident and a budding love affair with one of the scientists in the group, Aeris, against the wishes of the group, also becomes genetically altered, and she soon realises that it is up to her to find out what her mother had discovered.
There’s a lot she doesn’t know about her past and her mother’s past, so there’s a good bit of mystery in the story, and of course, whenever you have enhanced humans there are evil people who want to poke them, prod them and use them for their own ends, providing convenient antagonists. Aeris has a long-time friend who was also enhanced against his will while in the military, but his enhancements are in the form of mechanical additions to his body. The antagonism between the mechanically and genetically enhanced adds another layer of tension to the story.
The story over the course of the three books has plenty of twists and turns and a nice mix of romance and drama. There are some typos but not enough to detract from the story.
4 stars.
If you enjoy book one, I recommend reading the whole series.
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