The Arm of the Starfish - Part 1

This week Danielle breaks out the Madeleine L'Engle classic The Arm of the Starfish. Adam is your typical-sixteen-year old biology prodigy on his way to Lisbon to work with superstar biologist Dr. O'Keefe. While being held up at the airport because of fog, Adam is approached by the attractive Kali who warns him not to trust the O'Keefes. Adam is perplexed by this encounter, but shrugs it off as he jets off across the Atlantic, before making an unexpected stop in Madrid due to yet more fog. While there, a friend of the O'Keefes, a priest named Canon Tallis, is escorting Poly, the twelve-year-old daughter of the O'Keefes, back from a vacation in the U.S. Tallis asks Adam, the teenage boy he just met, to take over the escort duty of this young girl while he does some business in Madrid. This is the first of many bafflingly terrible decisions every character seems to make. On the flight from Madrid to Lisbon Poly is immediately, and expertly, kidnapped. Fortunately, Dr. O'Keefe is nonplussed by the loss of his daughter when Adam arrives. Later, while recuperating in a hotel Adam is magically found by Kali, who just happens to be in the neighborhood and who insists on taking him to meet her mega-rich-totally-not-evil businessman father Typhon Cutter. Typhon has just so happened to have found Poly and is returning her to the O'Keefes on the condition Adam reports to him on the super secret, world changing work Dr. O'Keefe is doing. Sam is annoyed that Typhon gives up a perfectly good kidnapped hostage to instead rely on a stranger of a teenager to get his information for him. Adam, meanwhile, must wrestle with the most difficult question of who to trust: The world famous scientist he's going to work for, or the kidnapping businessman who wants him to spy on the O'Keefes. Also, there aren't really any starfish in this part, but there is a kinda psychic dolphin, so that has to count for something.