Tolog Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

The Adoration of Jenna Fox
by Mary E. Pearson
reviewed by Chase Hayes

In Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox the reader is taken on a teenager’s road to recovery told in first person by Jenna Fox. Jenna is a 17 year old girl who has just woken up from a year-long coma. She finds herself in a new home with no friends, not able to eat real food, and with no memories. Over time, Jenna develops tons of questions and starts wondering what happened to her and why. Her family won’t give her answers. Instead, they just give her video discs of her life before her accident. On her own, she slowly begins to remember bits and pieces of her past. One day Jenna wandered out of her house and met her neighbor, Clayton Bender. That was the first person she had talked to other than her family while out of coma. After begging her mom to let her go back to school, Jenna enrolled in a very small charter school that was “nothing more than an abandoned real estate office” (Pearson 65). Jenna was brought into a classroom full of furniture and three students. With the help of her few classmates and her neighbor Clayton Bender, she was able to connect the dots and uncover details of the accident that nearly killed her.

I loved this book and would totally recommend it to others who love science fiction. You won’t want to put it down. Pearson does an amazing job of describing everything with great detail by using literary devices, which helps you see and understand what Jenna talks about. Pearson uses the metaphor, “Her eyes are glassy puddles” (Pearson 48) to show how sad Jenna’s mother is that Jenna is going to school on her own. Pearson uses personification as Jenna describes what some of the buildings in her neighborhood look like after an earthquake by saying, “we pass a toppled building, it's rubble being eaten by weeds, and vines” (Pearson 85). By describing it that way, the reader is able to picture the ruins of the shaken building.