The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
reviewed by Grace Sadahiro
The truly fascinating and metaphorical science-fiction novel, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, by Mary E. Pearson brings the reader through the thoughts of an eighteen year-old girl trying to discover who she really is. She encounters bumps in the road throughout her journey finding her true identity, but her parents and grandmother are by her side to help. The novel leads Jenna through a compelling ride as pieces of her memories begin to gradually rehabilitate. This story takes place in the future, in which the medical product BioGel saved Jenna’s life.
Jenna, a seventeen year-old teenage girl, has an accident causing her memory loss and her dormant coma. When she wakes up, she finds herself taken away from her home in Boston and now with her family across the country in California. Her parents try to speed up the memory process by showing her home videos of what she used to do.
Once Jenna’s parents allow her to attend school, she meets Dane, Ethan, and Allys at a progressive school for scientifically altered people. Although realizing she is not much different than the three new people she meets, the reader can dig into Jenna’s thoughts, “Isn’t that what all of life is anyway? Shards. Bits. Moments. Am I less because I have fewer, or do the few I have mean more?” (Pearson 80). Jenna talks to herself and uses
memories to refer to shards and bits just like puzzle pieces. She wants to know if life is simply made of memories and if the larger or fewer quantity of them are more valuable.
Even though she goes to school with people of other problems, Jenna Fox still feels like a stranger in her own home and skin as she thinks, “There were no days. There were no nights. Eighteen months was nothing. And it was eternity.” (Pearson 166). She knows that she was in a car accident, but cannot find out why she missed over a year of access to the real world. In her home, Jenna discovers a locked closet and breaks in. She intends to take one of the three computers she finds, but one of the brackets slices her hand open. To her realization that she has blue layers of BioGel in her skin, Jenna confronts her mother for not telling her about the accident. Her parents explain that ten percent of her brain was saved, and the only way to save her life was with BioGel. Because the BioGel is illegal in Boston, they secretly moved to California.
Other events from the novel occur throughout the falling action. The Adoration of Jenna Fox is an amazing, thought-provoking novel making me want to dig deeper into Jenna’s story. Pearson creates powerful auditory imagery when she writes out what Jenna is thinking momentarily. In addition, the novel has dramatic irony because the reader knows Jenna’s thoughts.
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