Reviews: (by author)

Halam, Ann. Taylor Five. New York: Wendy Lamb Books, 2004. $15.95 Hardcover ISBN 0-385-73094-2, 197 pp. www.randomhouse.com/kids

Life for a fourteen-year-old girl, entering the emotionally charged teenage years, is difficult enough without having to come to terms with the fact that your existence in and of itself is a science experiment.   That is the circumstance of clone Taylor Walker's young life as she lives with her parents in an orangutan refuge on the island of Borneo.   Nonetheless, Tay perseveres and endeavors to live as normal a life as she can, until a series of events force her to confront the confusion that is her life.   A rebel invasion of her parent's orangutan refuge has left the place a charred ruin with no discernable survivors.   Tay and her brother Donny were fortunate enough to be away from the camp the day of the invasions.   Now they are orphans in the wilderness of Borneo.   In their journey to find help and answers as to what happened to their family, Tay sustains the loss of her beloved brother and is forced to rely, for her emotional sustenance, on Uncle, one of the only orangutans from her parent's refuge to survive the rebel attack.   As her relationship with Uncle develops, she increasingly views him as a human being with whom she can share her innermost feelings and crises.   It is in this relationship with Uncle that Tay finds liberation from her inferior feelings that stem from her being a clone.   She recognizes that she is more than just a "copy" of Pam Taylor, her cloned mother, and that what makes her a unique person is not how she looks but what she feels and what constitutes her memories.

The story of Taylor Walker, while compelling because of its relevance to current scientific and public policy debates, lacks sophistication given the complicated nature of the cloning issue.   While it is possible to glean certain valuable lessens from the novel, such as the primary importance of individuality in the development of the human person, it leaves potentially untidy relationships simplistically resolved, particularly between Taylor and her genetic mother Pam.   For all of the emotional distress that Tay suffers throughout the narrative, the reader could easily conclude a life of similar cataclysm.   However, the author's optimistic tone in the final pages of the book seems to contradict the dysfunction of reality portrayed in Tay's life and is, rather, supportive of some inconsistent overarching political agenda.

Reviewed by Rebekah Tobias, June 2004

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