REVIEWS: 'The Last One,' by Alexandra Oliva, and 'One in a Billion,' by Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher

By Alexandra Oliva. (Random House, 294 pages, $26.)

What happens when a reality show gets, well, real? This debut novel begins on the set of a "Survivor"-like TV show, but then throws in the sort of wrench that readers of the riveting "Station Eleven" will recognize: a global pandemic that catches everyone unawares. Chaos ensues.

Every aspect of life becomes a challenge — which is exactly how one contestant, Mae, regards the made-for-TV situations she encounters: A rabid coyote is really an animatronic creature to be fought off. A dying baby is a doll and an audio feed. A ghostlike neighborhood is evidence that this is a high-budget show, able to relocate residents for a day or so of filming.

Illogical? Not if you're competitive, cut off from technology and primed to expect such scenarios. Oliva weaves in scenes from other contestants and a spot-on viewers' comments thread, until they also fall silent. How Mae finally discerns the truth from "reality" could be the stuff of TV-hyped drama, but Oliva lets this unfold with compelling restraint. Fans of post-apocalyptic lit should find "The Last One" a doom-worthy read.

KIM ODE

By Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher. (Simon & Schuster, 246 pages, $26.)

Two-year-old Nic Volker was so sick that the best minds in medicine couldn't figure out why the simple act of eating repeatedly plunged him into a death spiral. With bright blue eyes, dressed in his Batman costume, the boy suffered wounds so severe that even some nurses turned away.

In a move unprecedented in humans, the scientists set out to map the little boy's entire DNA sequence in hopes of developing a tailor-made cure. Nic's genetic error, it turned out, was smaller than "a single typo in the 55-million-word Encyclopaedia Britannica online edition," the authors wrote.

Nic became the first patient saved by doctors using DNA sequencing, raising hopes that others with extremely rare conditions could get targeted treatments. But, as Johnson and Gallagher noted, this new frontier also will force families like Nic's into the murky ethical and emotional waters of genomic medicine, for which neither they nor the medical community may yet be prepared.

Jackie Crosby