Jenny Pox (The Paranormals, Book 1) [Kindle Edition]

JL Bryan (Author)

Book Description

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.

* * *

Not recommended for readers under eighteen.

BONUS: Includes an excerpt of Glimpse by Stacey Wallace Benefiel.

The other books in the Paranormals series--Tommy Nightmare, Alexander Death, and Jenny Plague-Bringer--are now available on Amazon.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This tale highlights both the inspiring strengths and the abhorrent cruelties of human nature, forcing us to run through the full gamut of emotional responses and refusing to let us return to reality until everything Mr. Bryan wants us to experience has been felt, seen, and fully absorbed." -Jenny, Supernatural Snark

"This book has it all: teenage angst, sex, drugs, hiding an evil agenda disguised as a religious quest, evil cheerleaders." -Heather, Bewitched Bookworms

"This is one of the best novels of the year I've read so far, and I absolutely enjoyed every minute of it." -Darkeva's Dark Delights

"JL Bryan has written a book that runs the gamut from young adult romance to revenge thriller to horror novel to grand fantasy epic love story, and doesn't miss on any fronts. I was, quite simply, blown away." -John Hartness, Author of Hard Day's Knight

Selected by Geeks of Doom for Top 10 Urban Fantasy Books of 2010.

Winner of a Red Adept Award: #1 in Horror for 2010.

About the Author

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science fiction into new kinds of stories.

He is the author of The Paranormals series (Jenny Pox, Tommy Nightmare, Alexander Death) and other books. Fairy Metal Thunder is the first book in his new Songs of Magic series. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina, his baby son John, and some dogs and cats.

Twitter: @jlbryanbooks

Product Details

• File Size: 572 KB
• Print Length: 312 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 146096523X
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: www.jlbryanbooks.com; 1 edition (July 22, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B003X9775G
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #804 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
  • #11 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Occult

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't wait as long as I did to read this amazing book! January 11, 2011

By Stacey Wallace Benefiel

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

All sorts of people recommended this book to me-friends, writers, book bloggers, people on Goodreads. I have no idea what took me so long to finally get to it, because it is just the kind of book I like. I couldn't read Jenny Pox fast enough!
This book is a lot of different things, not just another paranormal/supernatural romance. There are plenty of grusome images and vivid descriptions to delight a horror lover, plenty of high school antics and cliqueishness for people who like contemporary. There's Southern charm, rednecks, Jesus freaks, old money, mythology, religion, difficult parent/child relationships and yes, a very sweet romance.
The writing was descriptive without being annoyingly so. The dialogue was natural for both teens and people from the South. The characters well-defined.
I just really dug this book and will be first in line for the sequel!

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Do you hear that slurping sound? That's me...getting sucked into this book. January 15, 2011

By Michelle

Format:Kindle Edition

The three main characters in this story are Jenny, Seth, and Ashleigh. Each wields a different supernatural power. At first they don't know this about each other but soon they discover each other's secret. Jenny and Seth just want a normal life, but Ashleigh has other plans. Their lives are intertwined more than they realize and eventually Ashleigh's evil intentions are discovered. Jenny and Seth are the only ones who can stop her.

Jenny is the shy loner -- by necessity. She cannot touch anyone without giving them a disgusting pox or even, ya know...killing them. She has to cover her bare skin even in the summer and wear gloves at all times, hence the cruel "Jenny Mittens" nickname her classmates give her. The first couple of chapters set the stage for how Jenny has grown up living a lonely life, never able to touch or be touched without deadly consequences. I did kind of wonder how she could get through grade school unsupervised without being touched (except for the one incident between her and Ashleigh) and her power being discovered, but I decided to go with the flow and assume she was able to do this.

Seth has the opposite power to Jenny. He can heal with his touch. Their powers seem to cancel each other out and he is the only person Jenny can touch. Seth starts out as a bit of a jerk but you soon realize he is not quite himself because of Ashleigh. He turns out to be stand-up guy. Seth actually likes Jenny, and Ashleigh is none too happy about it.

Ashleigh's power is to make people feel love...love for her or love for each other. She is like an evil and selfish cupid. People become her puppets and she uses this power for her own selfish reasons regardless of the consequences to that person. She is the ultimate mean girl: nasty, manipulative, cruel, devious, power hungry, selfish, and vengeful. She has no remorse and no redeemable qualities. Nothing and nobody will get in her way to get what she wants. She is the character you love to hate.

At 103K words, this is a fairly long novel, but it read very quickly as I was totally absorbed by the story. At one point I had to stop to recharge my ereader and I was impatient to get back to it. There were times when there was more description than I would like as I'm more of a dialogue kinda gal, but it still held my interest. This book is labeled horror and for most of the book I didn't really see it that way, but when you get to the Carrie-like climactic scene you can see why it might be considered horror. It was pretty gross, but given Jenny's power of inflicting an instant plague-like disease on people, it makes sense that it played out this way.

The main characters are in high school and much of the story revolves around the school environment so you might take this as a YA book. However, I would probably recommend this book to the older end of the teen audience or adults as it does have quite a bit of casual drug use and a couple of brief sex scenes.

So, overall I thought this was a well-written and absorbing story. There were actually quite a few typos but I was so into the story that they did not distract me like they usually do. If you like stories with superpowers, high school angst, villainous mean girls, a sweet romance, and a dash of the horrific (and don't mind the gross factor), then you might like this one. Oh, and there's a dog in the story - just icing on the cake! :)

Word Count: approx. 103,000

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Impressed March 26, 2011

By Lasciel

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from this book. Inexpensive, young adult fiction with a female lead? However, I was surprised and impressed. As I read I kept expecting it to go wrong somewhere, but it never did. While the triangle of the evil, pretty popular girl and good but clueless handsome male lead with a female loser/outcast is common enough, it never felt old here, and it felt like a very fresh take on that sort of thing. More like that typical dynamic was just window dressing for another, deeper dynamic.

While some readers are put off by the sex and drug use in the book, I found the sex scenes relatively tame in the book. I've read smuttier stuff in classic literature. I can't recall there being a single case of graphic female-male penetrative sex in this book. There's mostly instances of nudity, kissing, etc. As for drug use... some of the teenagers smoke pot. There is an incidence of cocaine use, but not by the main characters, and it is in no way portrayed as a good or cool thing to do.

While I don't really see why this book should be marketed specifically as young adult (other than containing teenagers as main cast) it seems perfectly appropriate for a younger teen to read. The facts are, if your teen isn't homeschooled and very sheltered, they encounter kids everyday who smoke marijuana. Who have sex. Keeping them away from this book won't keep them away from mentions of drug use or hearing about explicit sex. I say this is as a college freshman-I can well remember hearing way, way more than I wanted to about people's relationships at high school and even in middle school. Perhaps this book will seem shocking to 40-year old parents out there, but to someone fresh from the perils of high school it's nothing out of the ordinary. The one thing that is unusual romantically/sexually about this book is the female/female dynamics-few young adult books that aren't LGBT focused are willing to include female/female subtext and undertones.

The writing itself is GOOD. If you read a lot of books you get pretty good at seeing how things are going to play out for the characters-that never happened here. I was always being surprised and looking forward to what would happen next. This book keeps you on your toes and is surprisingly suspenseful. I actually don't like getting so invested in what's going to happen to a character-it's rather stressful! I also like that this book focused less on moral absolutes like Good VS Evil and instead illustrated power dynamics and struggles for control.

I was especially impressed with the writer's portrayal of female characters. This book manages to have unique, out-there females without ever straying towards the dreaded Mary Sue syndrome. I have read a lot of young adult novels and most of the female characters either tend towards Mary-Sueism or are trainwrecks (there are notable exceptions, such as girls in The Hunger Games trilogy and other). While the male characters in this story are realistic and can garner emotion and investment from you, it is the women in this story who are the key players, struggling and manipulating and calling the shots without ever seeming unrealistically strong or talented.

-Another reader who can't wait for the next book.

More About the Author

J.L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science fiction into new kinds of stories.

He is the author of The Paranormals series (Jenny Pox, Tommy Nightmare, Alexander Death) and other books. Fairy Metal Thunder is the first book in his new Songs of Magic series. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Christina, his baby son John, and some dogs and cats.

Website: www.jlbryanbooks.com
Twitter: @jlbryanbooks