“I wanted to write the message I needed when I was a teen —
that you are never second best, because there’s only one you.”
A paid journalist since age 14, I’ve covered
engineering, veterinary medicine and aviation in-depth.
With my first young-adult, sci-fi thriller novel, Starlight Everlasting, I want to use that science-writing expertise and merge it with my dream of writing fiction.
It’s 2077, and 15-year-old Deklan has been deleted from her family.
One of the last children to be born without genetic modification, Deklan is a spectacular disappointment to her father Abram, the Minister of Science and Technology for the One World Federation.
Deklan’s little sister is Abram’s preferred child. Deklan’s sister has all the perks of a GenMod – perfectly curated looks, brains and temperament – and a desire to do everything just like her dad. When Deklan’s sister is murdered, Abram summons all his power and resources to resurrect his lost child through cloning, edit the pain out of himself, control his wife (who never loved him as much as he wanted), and eliminate Deklan entirely.
Deklan evades execution and sets out to reach her mother before Abram can edit her. On her mission, Deklan hides in the secret district, The Sixth, finding two science-experiment rejects – a hybrid frog-human who makes Deklan laugh again, and a hybrid octopus-girl who shows Deklan she was never second best, and her imperfections are what make her lovable.
The trio overcome many perils to get to Abram and confront him. Abram reveals Deklan was never his daughter at all, but the daughter of her mom’s first and only true love, and that jealousy is at the root of all Abram’s tyranny (parallel to Deklan’s second-best complex). Deklan’s bravery and selflessness open up Abram’s love for Deklan he’s never allowed himself to feel. Deklan’s mom, in turn, is able to truly love Abram when he accepts Deklan. Abram’s Doomsday plan is tempered by Deklan’s ultimate sacrifice, proving there’s still potential for balance and hope on the planet, where it seems humans have gone too far meddling with nature.
Like Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Deklan’s superpower is her natural-born human perception and empathy in a society where imperfections and deep feelings have been edited out, and she must use it to combat a government-science-experiment conspiracy like Justin Cronin’s The Passage.