Origin by Jessica Khoury

Publisher's summary: Pia has grown up in a secret laboratory hidden deep in the Amazon rain forest. She was raised by a team of scientists who have created her to be the start of a new immortal race. But on the night of her seventeenth birthday, Pia discovers a hole in the electric fence that surrounds her sterile home--and sneaks outside the compound for the first time in her life.

Free in the jungle, Pia meets Eio, a boy from a nearby village. Together, they embark on a race against time to discover the truth about Pia's origin--a truth with deadly consequences that will change their lives forever.

Origin is a beautifully told, shocking new way to look at an age-old desire: to live forever, no matter the cost.

My take: I really enjoyed reading this book! I liked Origin so much that I was able to create a very vivid picture of Pia’s rain forest in my mind…with lots of green, splashes of flowers and lots of exotic animals, and, amongst all of that…a science research lab right smack in the middle of it all. And I love taking my mind back to that picture.

The characters in this story were very well developed. Pia was utterly fascinating in and of herself as the protagonist. She is a genetically born immortal who has been raised as a singularly consistent and compliant test subject; and she’s perfectly happy with that role, but she doesn’t always like the tests. In her mind all she cares about is that one day she will become one of the scientists running the lab and that she will be running the tests and genetically creating immortals just like her. I knew that I would be fascinated with her character right from the very first chapter as I read about one of the tests she was going through. The only thing I had a hard time with while reading about the characters was picturing Pia and this boy character, Eio, as teenagers throughout the story. I kept picturing them as slightly younger than teenagers, and I couldn’t get that picture out of my mind. I think it might have been because of Pia’s lack of normal human knowledge that had me picturing her as a younger girl. And, naturally, that means I kept picturing Pia’s love interest (Eio) as the same age as her.

The other characters that were introduced in the beginning of the story I wasn’t too sure about; however, just a few chapters further in, we (along with Pia) are introduced to a few other characters that I just fell in love with…of course one of those being Eio.

The best parts of this book were discovering all the secrets and knowledge the scientists were keeping from Pia and also discovering if the only things she’s ever known are truly for the good or for the bad.

Oh! I do want to point out that I struggled big-time with the pronunciation of a lot of the names of the people and places in this book. So if anyone has an Origin pronunciation guide, I’d greatly appreciate you sharing it with me! LOL

The end is, of course, the best part! Jessica Khoury created a horrifically awesome twist and a couple of horrific betrayals that has almost the entire last part of the book in utter chaos…and it was crazy awesome.