Origin

Origin by Jessica Khoury

                Origin is a book about a girl named Pia who is a scientist’s greatest achievement, an immortal perfect human being. Pia is beautiful and talented. Her skin is bulletproof and she can’t be cut. The only thing that can kill her is the drop from the elysia flower. She has never seen the outside world, outside of her home in the scientist’s lab in the rainforest. Then, one day on her 16th birthday, Pia discovers something that changes her life forever: a hole in the fence.

                She climbs through and meets a boy named Eio. She finds him intriguing and keeps sneaking back and forth to see him. Pia soon finds the world is not as dangerous as she has been taught. Soon Pia falls in love with the strange boy named Eio. Together they uncover a horrific secret that could change both of their lives forever.

                This is an amazing dystopian romance action book. I freaking love it! My rating: ten out of ten.

A blob from 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 costs:

 

 

“You won't tell?"

"I'll add it to the box under my bed labeled 'The Secret Confession of the Immortal Pia'. Good Lord, girl, don't look so mortified. There's not actually a box.”

 

 

“That your eyes are like bits of sky seen through the leaves. And that, like the rain washes the mud from the leaves, you... how did he say it? Oh yes. That you wash the darkness from the world.”

“No one should live forever," I whisper. "Isn't that how it goes? There must 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. And so it goes.”

“He lifts my hand from the root and presses it to his bare chest, over his heart. My breath stops. I wonder if he can feel the pulse racing in my wrist, because it’s beating just as quickly as his heartbeat.

 

“Do you know the Ai’oan word for heart?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“It’s py’a.” We’re so close, his whisper is right in my ear, and his breath warms the side of my neck. “You are my heart, Pia”

I lick my lips. When did they get so dry?

His other hand cradles the back of my head, tipping my face upward. “A body can't live without a heart. And I can’t live without you.”

 

“I lied when I said you were ugly. It is not true. You…”

He scrubs at his hair, and his discomfort makes me smile.

“You are in fact very beautiful. More beautiful than any girl I know.”

 

“Ever since the moment you first knocked me over, then shone your stupid flashlight in my eyes and set your jaguar on me. I was angry, but mostly because I was terrified.”

 

“Am I really that scary?”

“Your beauty is,” he whispers.