I've been teaching English to Year 7 using a novel called 'The Monster Garden' for the last few years - it's about a girl who grows her own monster from a blob of cells stolen from her father's lab (he's a scientist working on genetic engineering).
The set of books is now extremely tatty, we're down to one between two & it's a bit dated - can anyone suggest something a little more up-to-date with a similar theme? Would prefer not to scrap all the other resources we've spent years developing to go with the scheme of work, so it'd be extremely useful to be able to slot a more contemporary novel into the scheme as a reader...