Monday 14 January 2013

Book Review: Jenny Pox (The Paranormals #1) By JL Bryan ****

Published: July 2010
Genre: Paranormal, Young Adult
My Rating: 4 Stars


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.







Jenny Pox is one of the most different books I have come across in a while, when I was reading I was pleasantly surprised that it was such a good book. The book is available for free on Amazon. I wanted to give some of the free e books a try, I didn't expect it to be such a great novel.


One of the things I loved most about this book was the mixture of young adult, paranormal romance and horror genres. For me it was a really interesting as sometimes the book seemed so "normal" then all of a sudden you were hauled in to the horror or paranormal, though sometimes it did seem not weave well together. By this I mean parts of the book seemed to become one genre, e.g this chapter was young adult, that chapter paranormal, the next pure horror, but when I reached the end I knew I had thoroughly enjoyed my time reading it.

My favourite character was Ashleigh, the antagonist of the novel. I just loved to hate her. She brought mean girls to a whole new level and I was always was surprised with her actions and motives. She was not your normal, stereotypical high school bitch, she was really conniving and intelligent with her evil plotting and scheming. It was really nice that Bryan interchanged the narratives between Jenny and Ashleigh so the audience gets to see Ashleigh's character, the author has done well with his character development.

I did really like Jenny too, in her own ways she perplexed me and at some points she plainly left me stunned. I thought she was going to be quite a boring character, riddled with timidness and shyness, the damsel in distress kind of girl though she has this deadly power. I was dead wrong. You learn that Jenny is an audacious and pretty fearless apart from her fear of killing someone, her personality becomes more understandable once you reach the end of the novel. 

The only thing I wish was different is that I'd of liked the relationship developed differently between Seth and Jenny, I was taken aback at how bold and brazen Jenny was with him given that she is hardly ever around people and has never had a crush before, the excitement could of been built up better on this. It felt like her feelings just developed in an instant just because he had a power, there were some parts in the book where I realised that if I was more emotionally invested I would of been upset but I wasn't so.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone over sixteen. Though it is a young adult book  there are some erotic scenes but they're not so glamorised, there is also drug and alcohol abuse and the novel can get really dark at times.

3 comments:

  1. this sounds really good think i shall get it :)

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  3. Great review, I've just downloaded it onto my iPad! I'm a new blogger myself and now following :) xx

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