Title: Jesus Kid
Author: Kayleigh Sky
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 482 Pages
Category: Sci-Fi
At a Glance: I think fantasy fans will have a good time with this novel, if they can hang in past the obvious plot gaps and wasted rehashes, but for me it was just a bit too much to handle.
Reviewed By: Sammy
Blurb: Thirty years ago, an asteroid stuck the Earth. Now killer plants hunt the last surviving humans.
Ori Scott is a young junkie running from his mother’s prophecy that he’d one day save the world from the killer plants. Her preaching made him a laughingstock and now he hides in his drugs. But he can’t hide the change in his veins. They are turning green, and the prophecy is dragging him into a dark struggle between invisible forces. Set up on bogus drug charges, Ori is taken to a secret facility where he becomes a test subject in experiments to discover an antidote to the alien plant’s sting.
Jack Doll is a cop with a vendetta against the plants that killed his best friend. All he has in the world now is his old friend’s lover, Rive. Together they form an unbreakable bond—or so he thought. Jack has never liked Rive’s friend, Ori, but he believes in Ori’s innocence and doesn’t understand Rive’s strange indifference to Ori’s conviction. Struggling with his suspicions, Jack can’t help digging into a mystery that draws him closer to Ori than ever before—and closer to somebody who has secrets to hide.
Alone and scared, Ori is grateful for Jack Doll’s friendship, and his longtime crush soon blossoms into love. But Ori has no plans to accept his fate. He wants to escape, and he doesn’t care if he takes the cure with him.
Review: Ori is known as the Jesus Kid. Unfortunately, no one asked Ori if he wanted to be the savior of mankind. When his mother survived an event that would decimate most of the population, and even a sting from the deadly booweed plant, it automatically marked her son and his precious blood as the potential saving factor for the dwindled human race. Then the worst happens, and Ori is abducted and ferried off to a research facility to be experimented on. His one saving grace? Jack Doll, police officer, who may not always like Ori but knows he is something special. Now they are on the run, trying to make it outside the safe place they have always known, and possibly, slowly, falling in love.
So many things could have gone right in this novel. First, the dystopian world that is built is really a fascinating one and while we aren’t given all the details, we are certainly privy to enough of them to get a real sense of time and place. While I had real difficulty swallowing the romance aspect between Ori and Jack, I can say that it had some grounding in belief, and it was okay—not much more than that, however. The real problem here was Ori and the fact that his interest in doing drugs nearly superseded everything else in his life. He was not the easiest guy to like, and where he was total chaos, Jack was completely by the book—orderly and put together. Jack’s fascination with Ori stemmed in the unreal, like he’d gone-down-a-rabbit-hole unreal. However, the romance was really secondary to the overall plot, and that is where this novel really became a tangled mess.
Characters who were once dead reappeared, and even though we were given information as to why, it still felt like the author changed their mind midstream and decided to resurrect some people. Then there’s the idea that Ori needs a cure when initially it was his blood that was supposed to be able to fight off the effects of the booweed, or at least that’s what we are led to believe at first. But the biggest problem was the constant rehashing of different plot points. I think a good editing would have trimmed this novel nearly in half or at least by a third, to be honest.
I think fantasy fans will have a good time with this novel, if they can hang in past the obvious plot gaps and wasted rehashes, but for me it was just a bit too much to handle.
You can buy Jesus Kid here:
[zilla_button url=”http://authl.it/B076TDHCS5?d” style=”blue” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]
