Alison Allen-Gray

I think the first time I’d heard of this book was when I was quite young, secondary school age for sure. I remember seeing a friend of mine with this book in her hand and she had told me that it was pretty good, and I believed her because why wouldn’t I? I was a young child who devoured books like there was no tomorrow and I was always on the look-out for my next read. So I kept it in mind for years, eventually buying it and then reading it years later, when I was definitely past being the target audience and age group for this book.
Although, it did help me surpass my reading goal from last year, so there’s that!
It’s not a terrible book, I’ll give you that. As an undergraduate student I was heavily invested in the TV show Orphan Black, and still do think it’s one of the best TV shows of the 2010s. This book rekindled a love of that TV show in me again, reminding me that I’ve always loved the concept of cloning and genetics.
Unique is the story of a young boy, Dominic, who finds out through his ailing grandfather that he had an older brother who died years before he was born. Dominic’s parents, very wealthy individuals, are trying to push Dominic into entering the scientific field, hoping for their son to achieve success there, but he is more interested in painting and being an artist, causing them immense disappointment. And when he finds out that he had an older brother who was very intelligent and invested in the medical field, he suddenly realizes why. But it all goes a step further when Dominic finds out that he’s not actually a younger sibling, but a clone of a boy who died in an unfortunate accident, and the product of an experiment to see if greatness could be replicated.
Is the story somewhat predictable? Completely. It’s a great read for young adults who have a budding interest in biology
But does it raise amazing questions? Absolutely.
The whole point of the story is that Dominic is his own person, a boy with his own ambitions and dreams and nothing like his ‘older brother’, the person he was cloned from. Dominic wants to break away from the wishes his parents have for him, wants to build his own life independently of the shadow of his genetic parent, but can’t because his parents have placed a burden of expectations on him that he doesn’t deserve. And this book perfectly highlights what everyone gets wrong about cloning.
The logic behind cloning is easy enough – if you take something and duplicate it, it’ll be the same. But people fail to realize that that only means on a genetic level, and not on any other level. While there will be some common traits, of course, such as physical appearances, there are also a lot of factors that come into the people we grow up to become which have nothing to do with genetics and all about how we’re raised – the Nature versus Nurture argument. And this book is the perfect fictional example of that.
Dominic, cloned and made into the spitting genetic image of his brother, grows up with a father who places a lot of emotional pressure on him, a mother who is heartbroken over the loss of her son, and a grandfather who is trying to bury it all within his mind, and all of this causes him to become a completely different person, one who inevitably becomes a disappointment.
So what did I ultimately think of this book? As a book, it gets a 3/5 from me. But as a concept, and as a way of working with the question of cloning, it definitely gets a 5/5, especially considering its target audience.… (mere)

This wasn't bad at all, quite an easy enjoyable read and fairly typical of what you'd expect from a young adult science fiction story.

I liked the ethical questions about scientific advances and the different philosophical viewpoints of the religious and the non-believers, some were nothing like what we would expect them to be. However, the author spent the first half of the book trying to create some mystery around the circumstances of Dominic's secret brother's life and death, this would have been fine if the book wasn't called 'unique' and the protagonist hadn't already found a photo album with pictures of a boy who looked exactly like him but was supposedly just his brother who died in the year before he was born. You'd have to be an idiot not to guess what was going on.

As for Dominic, I felt sorry for him on occasion but, overall, I found him quite a boring and uninventive character. The author was trying to say something about individualism in this novel and make Dominic (2) a unique person that could shine apart from his brother without turning into a psychological as well as a biological clone. The point seemed rather void to me when Dominic didn't have much of a personality - isn't that ruining the whole moral of the story?

The best character by far was 'Pops'. I loved his ramblings and his occasional insane nonsense that he would spurt out; like near the end of the book when he's rushing through the house and shouts "fish balls", he's a bit of light entertainment in an otherwise serious young-adult novel.

Definitely interesting and enjoyable on the whole, I might have a look at some of the author's other writings.

… (mere)