Jenny Pox by J.L.Bryan

Synopsis from Goodreads.com
Jenny has a secret. Her touch spreads a supernatural plague.

She devotes her life to avoiding contact with people, until her senior year of high school, when she meets the one boy she can touch, and she falls in love.

But there's a problem--he's under the spell of his devious girlfriend Ashleigh, who secretly wields the most dangerous power of all.

Now Jenny must learn to use the deadly "Jenny pox" she's fought her entire life to hide, or be destroyed by Ashleigh's ruthless plans.



My review:
This was a freebie from Amazon and was actually a really good read. The story focuses on Jenny Morton, who has the power to cast diseases on people just by touching them. Her mother died during childbirth as did the doctor and nurses and her father soon realised he shouldn't touch her either. She has always followed one simple rule through her 16 years of life: Do Not Touch People and as part of this rule she covers up all her bare skin constantly including wearing gloves. As you would expect she gets a pretty hard time at high school, and in particular from the head cheerleader and head of everything else.

One day whilst out walking her dog, a stray Jenny adopted, one of the jocks from school runs him over and nearly kills him. Another kid from school stops and heals the dog to Jenny's amazement. She wants to get to know this boy better, but of course, he is the boyfriend of the queen bee! They do start to form a friendship and Jenny finds out she can touch him - the one and only person she has ever been able to touch without hurting. She becomes pretty dependent on him almost immediately and loses him as a friend quite quickly as he returns back to his girlfriend. Both he and Jenny soon work out that Ashleigh is not who they thought she was and know that she must be stopped!

I loved the idea of the untouchable side of Jenny but when she finds out she can touch Seth, she completely changes. Gone is the scared, timid girl trying to hide from everyone. Out comes a confident, happy beaming girl instead. The powers of the 3 main characters worked really well with and against each other and the descriptions of Jenny's curse were fab! Truly disgusting, but fab!

The history behind all 3 powers and characters was a really good touch too. It was well explained and the whole story was well written. There were never any parts where I wanted the story to move on a bit quicker and several times I wanted Jenny to turn around and punch Ashleigh and at times Seth.

Look forward to seeing how the rest of this series pans out now!