Review | 'Origin'

Origin by Jessica Khoury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So I went into this book not knowing what to expect. I suppose my expectations ranged somewhere in-between complete-and-total-let-down and phenomenal-book-holy-cow. Origin, however, defied my expectations, yet did not fall anywhere within that range.

Origin is the unique story of Pia, the lone immortal human in the world, hidden away in the Amazon forest, and her experiences with the outside world after sneaking out of her sanctuary and uncovering secrets about the science team that helped make her who she is. She meets, and falls for, Eio, a boy from the local native tribe, and together, they unlock the aforementioned secrets, as well as hitting their own personal barriers along the way.

From the get-go, I disliked Pia. This dislike made sense, though. Pia had spent her whole life being told she was perfect, and she flaunted it for the first 100-ish pages. She was vain, spoiled, proud, and didn't really give a damn about the well-being of others. What's tough about writing a story about a perfect, immortal girl, is that she can't have flaws, unless the author wants to take the route of scientific corruption, and so on and so forth. But it wasn't evident that Khoury wanted to take that route; so I felt like all the nasty personality defects Pia projected at the beginning of the story should not have been there, because the story revolves more around how the scientists use Pia rather than any mistakes they made in turning her into an immortal.

Pia's relationship with Eio was very real, though, although I totally would have thought Pia, being a perfect human being and all, would have been more--how do I put this?--forward with Eio. I bet that seventeen years of suppressing sexuality would have had to pay off at some point or another, so I found it quite unrealistic that Pia wasn't like every other freaking YA heroine and kept her physical distance from this heartthrob of a boy, although she did comment on the structure of his muscles and the droop of his shorts multiple times. Apart from the minute annoyance of Pia's lack of romance, I really liked the blossoming (no pun intended) of their relationship. While Pia's narration of the story was a bit weird to me (I don't know why; I mean I can't really put my finger on it), the evolution of their relationship was quite interesting and was obviously the drive for the rest of the story, at least the whole Pia/Eio subplot.

As far as the arc of the plot goes, I thought the subplots and main plot structure were very well tied together. I use the term "woven" quite often in my reviews, and I will apply it again; Jessica Khoury weaves the story together very nicely, and makes for a very climactic, albeit long, ending. Spoilers initiate here, I warn thee. I really loved the ending and how Immortal Pia was killed, but Mortal Pia remained. That way, the one thing that kept Pia from jumping at Eio, her immortality, was now out of the way, and they could go make beautiful babies. The whole defiance of the scientists was honestly something I didn't except; I thought the climax of the story would revolve around the consequences of Pia's choices with Eio, which it did, in a sense, but not nearly as much as I thought it did. I thought it was interesting to see how Pia's Wickham tests accounted for what she would be doing to prolong immortality and eternity for other beings. For a period of time, I didn't think her tests made that much sense, but they completely did. Last but certainly not least, the epilogue was a fantastic conclusion to the novel, and I really loved reading from Harriet's perspective, and how she viewed the story's events.

Despite a few flaws in its design, Origin is a magnificently-crafted tale of choice, eternity, mortality, and morality.

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