Origin Review

Origin by Jessica Khoury

Title: Origin

Author: Jessica Khoury

Series: Origin #1 (Has a Short Story Companion)

Publisher: Razorbill

Publication Date: September 4, 2012

Genre: Science fiction; Mystery; Romance; Young Adult

Pages: 394

Format: Hardback
goodreads

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.

“We are limited only by the questions we haven’t yet thought to ask.”

Pia is perfect. Or at least that’s what everyone tells her. She had unbreakable skin, enhanced reflexes to match those of a cat’s, and incomparable speed and agility (but not strength). Oh, and she’s immortal. Her life expectancy is eternity. She is alone in that she is the first and the only of her kind. She dreams of creating her own race, her own Mr. Perfect, so she won’t have to be alone. Hidden away in the jungle, she has never seen the outside world. She is happy with her home and her family of scientists, never questioning her way of life. Until. One fateful day she escapes into the jungle and gets her first taste of freedom, and meets a boy named Eio. With the help of the natives, she learns the truth of her origin. And it changes everything.

I don’t know what I expected from this novel. A fun story, maybe, that I would quickly forget and never think about again. A filler of space and time that would entertain me and keep my boredom at bay. This book was all of those things. And not much else.

“‘No one should live forever,’ I whisper. ‘Isn’t that how it goes? ‘There must me be a balance. No birth without death. No life without tears. What is taken from the world must be given back. No one should live forever, but should give his blood to the river when the time comes so that tomorrow another may live.’”

While the frequently brought up questions of immortality and ethics were interesting and insightful, and it did add depth to the plot, this book could’ve been so much more. The characters, in my opinion, fell flat in terms of complexity and, well, character. There was only one layer to their personalities, and I wanted there to be more. Pia, for example, was supposed to be smart, agile, and perfect, but all I read was a normal teenage girl who couldn’t get paper cuts. She was raised as a scientist but was ironically incurious about what was going on behind lab doors. Eio, too, was flat and uninteresting. The romance between the two was border-line insta-love (just add water!). This book didn’t connect with me.

The only truly good thing about this book was the insightfulness of the questions it brought up, the creativity behind the science in the book, and the setting. It was just interesting enough that I kept reading until the end of the book, but, honestly, this book was way too long and had too many extraneous elements for what the author was trying to convey. A book this size should have more action, more suspense and climatic moments, and Origin fell flat.

Origin was not an entirely bad book. It was just sub-par to all the other sci-fy books I had read in the past. It had so much potential, and I wanted to love it, but I couldn't. In short: unimpressive, and only the slightest bit interesting

 “They all haunt my mind, waiting for me in the shadow of sleep. Reminding me how fragile this life is and how easily it can be lost. Compelling me to live and to live well, while I still can.

Because sooner or later, we must all face eternity.”