Summary:
"Pia has always known her destiny. She is meant to start a new race, a line of descendants who will bring an end to death. She has been bred for no other purpose, genetically engineered to be immortal and raised by a team of scientists in a secret compound hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest. Now those scientists have begun to challenge her, with the goal of training her to carry on their dangerous work.
For as long as she can remember, Pia's greatest desire has been to fulfill their expectations. But on the night she turns seventeen, she finds a hole in the seemingly impenetrable fence that surrounds her sterile home. Free in the jungle for the first time in her life, Pia meets Eio, a boy from a nearby village. Unable to resist, she continues sneaking out to see him. As they fall in love, they begin to piece together the truth about Pia's origin--a truth with deadly consequences that will change their lives forever.
Origin is a beautifully told, electric new way to look at an age-old desire: to live forever. But is eternal life worth living if you can't spend it with the one you love?"
My Thoughts:
Okay, so, before I get into most of my thoughts, there was one quote from the book that really stood out to me and I feel that I have to share it here. I think it really sums up the book in a nutshell.
"They don't see things as we do here, Pia. They would put you in a box and never let you out, don't you see?" - Uncle Paolo, pg 30
Uncle Paolo is talking about how other people would perceive the livelihoods of the scientists who live in the
compound and what experiments they perform, and how they would react to
discovering that Pia is immortal, and how they would want to put her in a box
and study her and she could never truly be free. What is ironic about all of
this is that her whole life Pia has been kept solely in the compound, unable to
leave or to learn about the rest of the world. Anything that doesn't have to do
with her particular science projects or life outside of the compound has been
redacted. So, all of these scientists are already keeping her in a box and not
letting her out.
It's interesting to see how a scientific idea can start off as so
pure, so innocent, so hopeful, but then the longer attempts are made and
the longer they spend in such an isolated area, and the more success they start
to see, the more everything starts to become twisted into something almost
unrecognizable. They develop sort of a superiority complex bordering on a God
complex.
The descriptions of the tropical rain forest were so vivid and it
is remarkable that Jessica Khoury hadn't actually been to a rain forest until
after she wrote this book. It is amazing that such realism can be achieved even
with never having been to a region before.
In some ways this reminded me of stories like Pocahontas or the
Jungle Book or Tarzan or something, with Pia finding a way out of the
scientific compound and then learning more about the world and herself by
meeting the native peoples of the area.
Origin is
like nothing else I have read and I absolutely cannot wait to read more by
Jessica Khoury. It had a romance, a mystery, was sort of like a thriller, and
definitely about life and nature and science and progress, and the benefits and
consequences of pursuing certain paths. Sometimes it is difficult to list all
the reasons why you love a book or believe it to be amazing, so all I am going
to say here is that it is a definite 5/5 and I highly recommend that you go out
and read it for yourself.
I definitely plan on buying my own copy sometime soon.
Origin at
Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/origin-jessica-khoury/1108931150?ean=9781595145956
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