The description Emma Geen's debut novel, THE MANY SELVES OF KATHERINE NORTH, intrigued me from the start. Katherine "Kit" North works in research for ShenCorp to discover how animals live in their environments. To do this, she can "jump" into a created body of a fox or spider or whale through a neural connection and exist as that animal: hunting, playing, sensing, the same as they do. Sounds exciting doesn't it? Geen's writing during the scenes in which Kit is in another body really pop, too. Poetry in motion as it were.

Buckley, her partner, keeps an eye on her body while she embodies the animals and his voice grounds her to her human reality as well. But there is more going on at Shen Corp as Kit discovers when the head boss ask her to serve as poster girl for their tourism concept.

Kit doesn't think tourism, which would all newbie jumpers to inhabit the bodies of wild animals, is such a good idea. Then she finds out what more ShenCorp has in the works.

Geen uses different time lines to tell her story: present, with jumps back to different animal experiences and flashbacks to times in her childhood. The shifts can be a bit confusing, but it doesn't take too long to establish oneself in a new setting. Kit has depth; it's easy to empathize with her highs and lows and her confusions and questions.

Being able to transfer consciousness into an animal may have been written about by others in the past, but Geen's handling of this concept is special. I was shocked to find out she was not a zoologist at the end of the story in her notes; she's done scads of research to describe Kits' experiences in each creature. Where the story let me down a bit is that it slowed in some places and how Kit went about find answers to some of her questions didn't jive at all times. Overall, Geen is a talented writer, and I'd definitely read future books of hers. THE MANY SELVES OF KATHERINE NORTH is quite impressive for a debut novel with such tricky material.