REVIEWED by Jen B.

TITLE: Jesus Kid

AUTHOR: Kayleigh Sky

PUBLISHER: Kiss Drunk Books

LENGTH: 357 Pages

RELEASE DATE: December 6, 2017

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.

 

This was quite the interesting dystopian world.  There’s quite a bit going on here, but the gist is that an asteroid or something similar hit the earth changing life as we know it.  With the changes came these killer plants called Booweeds.  Most people live inside a walled community, where much of the focus is on the plants, but again, there is a lot going on.

Ori is believed to be the Jesus Kid, or the one who will save them all, though he doesn’t believe it. His mother was infected when he was born and has passed a type of immunity onto him.  He has not had a very good life and is a bit of a drug addict, not seeming to care about much at all, from work to sex.

Jack and Rive are cops and long-time friends.  Ori is also friends with Rive and, in fact, harbors feelings for him.  But everything is not as it seems, and Ori is set up for a fall and taken in where he is experimented on to determine if he somehow contains a cure against the Booweed attacks.

Honestly, I was confused through much of this story, but I was intrigued and riveted at the same time.  It is written in a unique style that is hard to describe and took a little getting used to.  It comes across as choppy, but it felt right at the same time, and I loved the unique speech and dialect.  Unfortunately, I think this contributed to my inability to connect with the characters like I had hoped. Each of the characters is going through some inner turmoil, back and forth on what’s expected and what the right thing is.  This continues throughout the story as well.

Much of the story contained unanswered questions, such as who is really on Ori’s side, or who actually did him wrong, that I couldn’t focus on Ori and Jack together as a couple.  I was so interested in getting the details of what was going on that I just kept on trucking.  The end felt a little rushed after everything that happened, and though I still felt a little confused, we did get most of the answers and a happy ending for our main characters.  This was my first book by Ms. Sky, but I definitely plan on reading more of her work.  She sure knows how to detail an interesting world!