Replica

Replica is a young adult book series created by Marilyn Kaye. It used to be sold alongside other popular series like Remnants and Animorphs. It was written by Marilyn Kaye who wrote the novel version of the screenplay Penelope.

The protagonist, Amy Candler or "Amy, Number Seven" is a clone who is one of thirteen female clones genetically designed to be perfect. Amy's adoptive mother, Nancy Candler, is one of the original scientists involved in Amy's creation. When she and the other scientists discovered that The Organization was planning to breed the Amys with the male clones (the Andys) to create a master race of superior human beings to take over the world, they decided that this was unethical and burned down the lab after sending all of the Amys to adoption agencies with false birth certificates.

At puberty, Amy becomes extremely gifted overnight. She has binocular eyes that are able to see from miles away, super speed, super strength, super intelligence, etc. She has no abilities that human beings do not possess, she is simply better at everything she does than nearly anyone else on Earth. The Organization becomes aware that the clones survived and starts hunting Amy.

Many of the books such as Secret Clique do not really provide much plot relevant information and are somewhat non-linear. Other books like The Best of the Best about a boy genius arriving at Parkside Middle School become relevant later in the series. In trying to figure out (and survive) the mysterious Organization, Amy discovers that one of her clone sisters Annie Perrault is involved with a neo-Nazi organization which ends up being directly linked to The Organization. The series touches on the moral implications of destroying everyone who isn't perfect and "sterilizing" human compassion.

The series consists of the following titles:

• Amy, Number Seven
• Pursuing Amy
• Another Amy
• Perfect Girls
• Secret Clique
• And the Two Shall Meet
• The Best of the Best
• Mystery Mother
• The Fever
• Ice Cold
• Lucky Thirteen
• In Search of Andy
• The Substitute
• The Beginning
• The Transformation
• Happy Birthday, Dear Amy
• Missing Pieces
• Return of the Perfect Girls
• Dreamcrusher
• Like Father, Like Son
• Virtual Amy
• The Plague Trilogy: Rewind
• The Plague Trilogy: Play
• The Plague Trilogy: Fast Forward
• All About Andy
• War of the Clones
• Amy, On Her Own

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Tropes used in Replica include:

• Abusive Parents: Andy Denker's father turned out to support The Organization and allowed him to be experimented on as a child.
• Achilles' Heel: Amy's earlobe. Strangely, the Andys, who were created by different scientists are not immune to this.
• A-Cup Angst: Averted when Tasha gloats about her new B-cup bra, Amy is completely ambivalent and does not seem to care that she is still an A.
• Adam and Eve Plot: Near the end of the series it is revealed that The Amys were all cloned from a woman named Eve Carrington and the Andys were cloned from Mr. Devon whose first name turns out to be Adam. The end up dating.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Played straight with Chris Skinner, Amy's third boyfriend, who eventually catches Tasha's eye. Also played straight when Andy is introduced as mysterious and potentially dangerous.
• Alpha Bitch: Jeanine Bryant in books 1-10, Linda and possibly Simone after that. Among the clones, Amy, Number Five could probably be counted.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Organization turns out to have goals similar to the Nazis then turns out to be an actual neo-Nazi organization.
• Anticlimax Boss: Sebastian, the android version of the evil Nazi leader who created Project Crescent was defeated by the defective clone, Aly Kendricks, who simply put the wrong batteries in his foot.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In Return of the Perfect Girls during the scene where the girls are realizing they've been kidnapped, Aimee Evans passes up the chance to sob about never being able to see her parents again and tries to get The Organization to understand how important her commercial shoot (and acting career) is.
• Artistic License: Biology: The clones are turned into selfish compliant jerks in the eighteenth book by having their emotional proteins turned off.
  • The Organization is able to "turn off" the clones' perfect DNA from some remote location, turning them into ordinary people without even having to be in the same room with them.
  • Amy is given some kind of genetic acceleration to turn her twenty-five on her thirteenth birthday.
  • The story behind how the clones were actually made perfect is changed a couple of times and never actually starts to make sense.
  • The bad guys repeatedly try and steal Amy's DNA by cutting her hair or fingernails.
• Artistic License Engineering: of course AA batteries can power an android even stronger than enhanced humans.
• Beach Episode: Return of the Perfect Girls though it's not completely unjustified.
• Big Bad: The Director who turns out to be the Parisian tour guide who fell off the Eiffel Tower reincarnated as an android. Yeah...
• Blackmail: What happens to Jeanine in Ice Cold.
• Blondes Are Evil: Played straight when Amy meets Aimee Evans, the selfish and spoiled actress. Though, in context of the series, Aimee isn't evil so much as self-centered.
• Broken Base: Many fans were extremely dissatisfied with the ending of the series. So dissatisfied that Marilyn Kaye considered writing a different ending or a new book altogether but never did.
• Comic Book Time: Amy Candler stays twelve for fifteen books, during which she has more than one spring or summer vacation and returns still in seventh grade.
• Complete Monster: Annie Perrault.
• Creepy Child: Adrian Peele.
• Did Not Do the Research: A lot of the information about cloning, genetic engineering, and how the human mind works is very off.
• Does This Remind You of Anything??: The Organization is strikingly (deliberately) reminiscent of the Nazi movement.
• Evil Plan: In Secret Clique the popular group plans to make all the people in their way disappear using telekinetic powers.
• Evil Twin: Obviously Aimee Evans (Number Ten), Annie Perrault (Number Nine), Amy Number Five.
• Fake-Out Make-Out: in Return of the Perfect Girls, when Amy and Andy are spotted plotting against the Organization, Andy explains they were searching an hiding place for, yhou know... Hilariously, or squicky, the answer is "You'll mate when we'll order you to!".
• Foe Yay: Amy/Jeanine, Amy/Annie, Amy/Five, Nancy/Grace.
• Freudian Excuse: In book sixteen, Amy runs into a couple trying to help troubled/runaway kids. The male half of this couple has violent anger problems that stem from his parents poorly handling his psychological disorder and forcing him into the hospital as a child.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Return of the Perfect Girls is rich with examples.
  • After Amy and Andy's midnight rendezvous, they find the other clones having a naked beach party. In other words, seventeen-year-old boys getting naked with thirteen-year-old girls.
  • When Cindy is preparing to turn off Amy's emotional proteins, turning her into a soulless follower, Amy asks how they will be able to fall in love and choose mates. Cindy assures her: "Oh, don't worry, you'll still mate. You'll still feel, you know," she giggled. "Sexy."
  • Some of the Amys are rapidly aged into adults despite being physically young teenagers so they can start mating sooner.
    • Wait. Boys and girls will be chemically brainwashed and their bodies will be aged, in order to turn them into obedient incubators. To create a master race which will dominate the world. And it's the fact that the girls are chronologically 13 that bothers you?
  • In Ice Cold Jeanine calls Eric gay and Amy says she can testify to his heterosexuality. Jeanine freaks out and demands to know if Amy and Eric are sexually active. This is a book written for kids eight and up.
    • For the author's defense, the question was asked in high school slang.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Organization's androids.
• Heel Face Turn: In the final books, it is revealed that Amy, Number Five was actually faking her cooperation with The Organization in order to get information out of them.
• Ho Yay: Andy/Chris.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Every Amy suffers from this at the end of the series. Except for Number Seven (see above).
• I Just Want to Be Special: Amy was desperate every time she lost her power. Tasha's nerve were really at stake, because she stands Amy being always superior to her, and than she must support Amy when she's depressed because she's not superior anymore. The series ends with Amy regaining her powers, enhanced, by volunteering as a test subject for the Evil Genius Creepy Child she stopped two dozen books before!
• Important Haircut: Amy gets her first real haircut ever at home, from her mother, to avoid the dangers of a salon.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Averted. Though all of the Amys start off with the same name and the same extraordinary skills, each Amy has a different personality and three of the Amys (Aimee Evans, Annie Perrault, and Aly Kendricks) are given different names by their birth parents, probably to keep the reader from confusing them.
• Inside a Computer System: The entire plot of Virtual Amy.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: Justified trope. When Amy visits the future she sees the world that the Amys and Andys created by repopulating it with superior (and Caucasian) beings.
• Just Friends: Amy and Andy in the end of the series. As well as Amy and every other male character she was interested in.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: In Dreamcrusher Amy is hit by lightning and becomes temporarily psychic.
• Love Dodecahedron: Much simpler than in other instances. Amy starts off loving Eric who Jeanine is crazy about. Later, Amy cheats on Eric with Andy who is supposedly her genetic soul mate and then when Eric scorns her she gets with Chris who her best friend Tasha eventually takes a liking to.
• Most Extreme Elimination Challenge: In Return of the Perfect Girls The Organization sets up a survivor-like challenge, Amys versus Andys with the losing team voting off a member each time. No one is told what happens to those who are voted off. It turns out that rather than going home they have their emotional proteins turned off, making them into soulless spoiled zombies.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: Tasha initially does not want Amy to date her brother, Eric. She gets over it.
• Mysterious Past: Amy, Number Seven. Andy Denker. Arguably ALL the clones including Chris Skinner who is only revealed to be a clone in the special Chris-centric book.
• Nebulous Evil Organisation: The Organization. Big duh.
  • Even worse: The Omniscient Council of Vagueness was never defeated. In the end, they are on the secret services watchlist, so they don't dare to move a finger anymore. Well, thank you CIA for terrifying an evil director we never saw!
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Pink Smock ladies are allegedly defective clones that did not turn out the way The Organization planned, but Amy is certain they were created to be soulless zombies who would do The Organization's bidding without question.
• New Age Retro Hippie: Monica is quite a stereotypical example.
• Nightmare Fuel: A few examples:
  • Amy Number Three dies from a heart attack listening to overwhelmingly loud bee buzzes during a scientific "test" of her clone abilities.
  • In And The Two Shall Meet James hits Flora's head against a rock and calls it an accident.
  • In In Search of Andy the catacombs scenes with the neo-Nazis are pretty messed up.
  • In Transformation all of the kids in Parkside are turned into zombies while watching a TV show called "Cherry Lane."
  • In Happy Birthday, Dear Amy she magically turns twenty-five overnight. When she goes out in this body, older men hit on her.
  • In Return of the Perfect Girls Cindy talks openly to Amy about the fact that she and the other Amys (who are then thirteen) will mate with the then seventeen-year-old Andys. Even to the point of GIGGLING while using the word "sexy."
  • In Dreamcrusher Amy gets the ability to psychically intuit whether or not someone's ambitions and dreams will come true. She ends up completely crushing many people's sense of hope.
• Overnight Age-Up: On her thirteenth birthday, Amy wakes up twenty-five.
• Plot Hole: There are quite a few.
  • In The Fever we learn that the clones lose their abilities when they get their ears pierced. Before their abilities are lost, they get deathly ill for at least a week. Yet in book twenty-three they pierce an enemy clone's ears to render him useless and he does not develop a fever. Neither does Amy, Number Five when she decides she wants to live a normal life.
  • Dr. Grace's last name changes at least once during the series.
  • In the first half of the series it seems that the world of Replica relies on science fiction (cloning and genetic engineering are accepted possibilities). When things like emotional proteins and Eve Carrington's miraculous recovery at the hands of Dr. Jaleski happen it starts to seem unclear how much is sci-fi and how much is fantasy.
  • The Organization, despite being powerful and intelligent enough to create perfect clones, create human androids, create near perfection in imperfect people, alter DNA from remote locations, and kidnap genetically superior children multiple times cannot keep said superior children from escaping and can be defeated by some lousy batteries.
• Puberty Superpower: The Amys do not become perfect at everything until puberty. For some reason.
  • Except the fact that they can't be ill, which prevented Amy from any medical exam.
• Rich Bitch: Jeanine Bryant, Aimee Evans.
• Sadist Teacher: Ms. Heartshorn in book 13 becomes this before revealing that she's really protecting Amy.
• Sailor Earth: Because it is known that The Organization created most of its members as clones, many fanfic authors create new sets of clones that are better than the originals (sometimes having magical powers or psychic abilities). "Project Star" is a notable example.
• Separated at Birth: Justified trope. All the clones are this.
• Shrinking Violet: Amy, Number Three. Apparently growing up on a farm makes you this. Also, Aly in Return of the Perfect Girls. But who wouldn't be in that situation?
• Skinheads: Annie's friends. Arguably the entire Organization.
• Sick Episode: The Fever ends up being plot-relevant as it reveals the fact that clones lose all of their abilities when she gets her ears pierced.
• The Plague: See The Plague Trilogy.
• Thirteen Is Unlucky: Aly. Just Aly.
• Unfortunate Implications: Annie Perrault and Andy, Number Three are age progressed to become adults so that they can start the work of the organization early. Since they were designed to breed a master race, this implies that Annie would become sexually active (and give birth) while still thirteen.
  • The Andys are seventeen in Return of the Perfect Girls whereas the Amys are thirteen. Halfway through the book, Cindy has to break up a naked beach party between near-legal males and thirteen-year-old females. Yet, Andy and Amy's relationship is seen as perfectly okay. They kiss when they meet even though he is sixteen and she is twelve. It takes an ~If It's You, It's Okay~ turn despite justifying creepy age differences instead of homosexuality.
    • Remember, they were designed to feel actracted to each other.
  • Amy, Number Three dies during one of The Organization's tests because she was raised on a farm and therefore sheltered from the harshness of the "real world."
  • In the sixteenth book, the man suffering from a psychological disorder insists that people with psychological disorders should not be seen as sick and should be treated like everyone else. He completely destroys himself the second he goes off his medication.
  • Again, in Mystery Mother Dr. Jaleski's wife is said to have psychological troubles which should account for her believing she is Amy's mother. Because she lost her daughter, Laura, she went crazy. If she is at all portrayed as sympathetic, it is in a very pitying way.
  • In Fast Forward Amy decides that maybe the world would be better off without imperfect people. Normal people from the reader's world are kidnapped from the wild where they hide and treated as invalids in a special home. She only decides that maybe average people *should* live when the perfect people turn on her in the end.
• Unstable Genetic Code: Annie Perrault after she is age progressed to adulthood.
• Very Special Episode: Book nine deals with the evils of drugs, book fifteen deals with the evils of subliminal messages.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: In Return of the Perfect Girls the zombie-like Pink Smock girls dye the clones' hair to help identify them. No mention is ever given of which Andy got the pink streak.