Book Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Trying to figure out who we are is something we all go through as teenagers. It’s like up until now all the important decisions have been made for us and now for the first time we get to choose which road we get to walk down. For Jenna Fox trying to find herself is a little more difficult.

            Jenna Fox had been in a coma for the past year of her life and that’s about all she knows about her life. To become reacquainted with herself Jenna has been given home movies of herself to watch. As the pieces of her life unfold she begins to learn that the love her parents have for her, and a whole lot of illegal technology, may be the only reason she’s even still her today.

            “The Adoration of Jenna Fox” is the latest creation from the mind of author Mary E. Pearson.

            This novel is a bit of a modern day “Tuck Everlasting” in that it deals with the subject of increasing the life expectancy of people. In the novel Jenna Fox is more or less pronounced dead until she in injected with Bio Gel, a chemical that seems to take the place of everything.

            In addition Jenna has her personality saved on a back-up computer in case something with this highly unfamiliar goes wrong.

            Although the situation of being rebuilt by chemicals is unfamiliar to most of us, Pearson’s book can help the reader build a better grasp on how they feel about certain medical procedures and how they want to live their own life. According to Jenna’s father on page 126, “What living thing doesn’t want to have a shelf life of some sort.”

            Another character in the book Lily, Jenna’s grandmother, makes the argument on page 34, “Sometimes we just don’t know hen we’ve gone too far.”

            By reading the different character’s views on indefinite horizon of the medical field I was forced to think about how I feel about the situation of if living forever is right.

            From beginning to end of Pearson’s novel I was on a journey with this character Jenna Fox trying to figure out who she was and where the story was going to go next.

            This novel was a bit general teen fiction, with doses of friendship woes with a little love story burrowed into it. Overall a good, quick read for a Sunday afternoon.