Virals

The book Virals is a novel about a girl named Tory Brennan, a smart, science-geek girl who finds herself in South Carolina with her father (Kit) after her mother dies in a car crash. Tory’s dad is a scientist who didn’t know he had a daughter until someone told him that he Tory’s new legal guardian. They are both still getting used to each other when suddenly, things start to get dangerous. It all starts when Tory and her friends start exploring Loggerhead Island, a home to a science research facility.

When she first goes to Loggerhead, Tory runs into the wolf-dog pack, a family of wolf-dog hybrids that live on the island. She rescues one of their puppies and returns him to the pack (after naming him Cooper, or Coop for short). From then on, she feels a sort of responsibility towards them and returns to Logger head once in a while to check up on them. Then, tory and her gang stumble across an old military dog tag that is rusted beyond recognition. Seduced by the idea of the mystery, they break into the lab to de-rust it with the fancy tools there. While in the lab, Tory and her gang find the Coop It appears he has been hurt, and purposefully infected with the parvovirus, a disease that only infects canine mammals. The group takes the puppy and scoots as fast as they can, hoping to heal the puppy and return him to the rest of the wolf-dog pack.

I think that Tory rescues the dog (twice) and feels a sense of responsibility toward him because her mom died, and she feels a little abandoned. She still has her dad, but Tory and Kit are unfamiliar and nowhere near as close as Tory and her mom had been. Tory feels like she has to protect the puppy because she knows how it feels to be left alone (and scared) and wants to help the little guy and return him to a safe place. Her friends are wary of the affinity Tory has for Coop (naming him and rescuing him and looking after him like a mother), but they go along with it, probably knowing that it will make Tory feel better about what happened to her mom.

After tory and her friends rescue Cooper from the lab, they try to nurse him back to health with antibiotics the y nabbed from the lab, but something they don’t know it that this strain of parvovirus could be a new one, never seen before. One that is infectious to humans.