The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle

"We're just beginning to learn why the regeneration is sometimes abnormal and malignant. We're just beginning to understand that you cannot change stones into bread. This is not the way miracles are worked, but it's always been a temptation. If what we are doing is taken over by the unscrupulous it can cause unimaginable horror and suffering. Here is power to give life to people, or to devour them. What I am trying to do is go back about two thousand years in my thinking. Somewhere in the last two thousand years we've gone off. When we began to depend on and develop things in the western world we lost something of inestimable value in our understanding. There's something wrong about trying to heal with a surgeon's knife. There's got to be an alternative to cutting and mutilating and I'm trying to learn it from the starfish. But I'm just at the beginning. And I'm afraid, Adam. If it gets out of my hands--I'm afraid." Dr. O'Keefe clenched his fist and pounded it softly against the papers on his desk. Then he smiled.

Sixteen-year old Adam Eddington is headed to the remote island of Gaea off the coast of Portugal to intern with a world-famous biologist, Dr. Calvin O'Keefe. (Last seen, you may recall, as the child heartthrob of A Wrinkle in Time.) Adam's not totally sure what O'Keefe's research is, though he knows it's about the regenerative properties of starfish. But whatever it is, it's important--and dangerous--enough that Adam finds himself in the middle of sudden intrigue. At JFK, a beautiful young woman named Kali Cutter tells him to beware of another passenger, a priest named Canon Tallis, who's escorting O'Keefe's daughter Poly back to Portugal. On a connecting flight, Tallis clocks Adam and entrusts Poly to his care, only for her to disappear mysteriously from an airplane bathroom.

For the first half of the novel, Adam is bewildered, unable to decide whether he should trust the O'Keefes or Kali and her mogul father, Typhon Cutter. (Like a true STEM kid, Adam never pauses to consider that Kali and Typhon are named for great destroyers of world mythology, which really should have been a giveaway.) He ultimately decides to throw his lot in with the O'Keefes because he can see they care about the "fall of the sparrow"--and not, as Typhon Cutter does, seizing O'Keefe's research for the greater benefit of America.

The Arm of the Starfish is essentially a shaggy dog spy story. O'Keefe's research sets up themes of radical empathy and love that are recognizable from A Wrinkle in Time, but to be honest, the research is mostly a red herring, an excuse to have Adam run around Lisbon trying to deliver a coded research report sewn into his clothes while Kali tries to seduce and persuade him into giving her his confidence. I have a suspicion that if you really pulled on the thread of the intrigue, it would all fall apart, not least when you ask yourself why a brilliant scientist like O'Keefe feels compelled to entrust spycraft to a sixteen-year old. But the story itself is as fast-paced and gripping as any airport paperback. The Arm of the Starfish is what more books ought to be: plain fun.