Review: Jenny Pox by J. L. Bryan

I won a copy of this book from LibraryThing.



About the Book

Eighteen-year-old Jenny Morton has a horrific secret: her touch spreads a deadly supernatural plague, the "Jenny pox." She lives by a single rule: Never touch anyone. A lifetime of avoiding any physical contact with others has made her isolated and painfully lonely in her small rural town.

Then she meets the one boy she can touch. Jenny feels herself falling for Seth...but if she's going to be with him, Jenny must learn to use the deadly pox inside her to confront his ruthless and manipulative girlfriend Ashleigh, who secretly wields the most dangerous power of all.

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My Review

I liked the story good enough. It just took me quite a while to get into this one. Once I got about half-way through the story I was attached and it went really fast. But getting to that "I don't want to put this one down" point took a while.

The premise of the story is pretty neat. Jenny has a "Midas Touch" of sorts, only it's in reverse. She's shunned by her father and by her peers. If life isn't hard enough for a teenager already poor Jenny's been dealt the worst hand of all. I really felt so sorry for her. I just wanted her to not be ostracized. All any girl wants is to find that place where she fits in. Jenny knows that she's not normal, but she's learned how to live with the hand life has dealt her. She's just biding her time until she can live out her life without the eyes of the town watching her.

As the story progresses and Jenny finds someone that she can actually touch I really wanted this to be the end to all of Jenny's problems. Ashleigh was such a horrible person and I really wanted to see her get what should have been coming to her. I wished from the first encounters with Ashleigh that Jenny would just have touched her and removed that thorn from her side. Seth seemed to sway back and fourth, sometimes I really wanted to hate him and other times I wanted to hug him. When it's revealed what is causing Seth's mood swings I couldn't wait to see how it was taken care of.

The end of the story was really good. It wasn't a cheesy ending, and it tied things up nicely. I was very happy with it. It was an enjoyable book to read and I connected with the story after a while.