The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Fox Chronicles #1) – Mary E. Pearson

Title: The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Fox Chronicles #1) by Mary E. Pearson
Publishing Info: September 1, 2009 by Macmillan
Genres: Science Fiction, Young Adult
Find it on the web: Buy from Amazon // GoodreadsDate Completed: June 12, 2012
Related Posts: The Fox Inheritance (The Fox Chronicles #2), Fox Forever (The Fox Chronicles #3), The Kiss of Deception (The Remnant Chronicles #1)

Who is Jenna Fox? Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name. She has just awoken from a coma, they tell her, and she is still recovering from a terrible accident in which she was involved a year ago. But what happened before that? Jenna doesn't remember her life. Or does she? And are the memories really hers?

Breaking It Down Further: After 17-year-old Jenna Fox finally awakens from a coma after 18 months, she can’t remember the accident that put her there. In fact, she can’t remember a lot about her life before the accident. Bit by bit, her memories come back to her as well as with the help of home movies. But something still doesn’t feel right to Jenna. Some of her memories seem off and others too clear. There’s the fact that her parents are basically keeping her captive inside their new home in California — A place they literally just moved to after the accident. And the fact that there are times when Jenna just doesn’t feel right in her body at all. Slowly, she tries to put together the pieces of what this accident did to her and how to recover what she can’t remember.

So I definitely think the less you know about the plot to start with, the better. The best part of the book (for me at least) was the very beginning. We only know what Jenna is thinking and feeling and as she get more curious, confused, and unsure about her new life, I really began to wonder… What in the Sam Hill did they do to this girl? Her memories are all garbled – Some missing, some way too vivid – and she feels weird in her own body. Is she a robot? Is this a virtual world and she’s only living out her life in a computer? Is she a clone? What’s going on here!?! So I read and I read and I read, dying to find out what happened to Jenna Fox, and finally – the reveal!

Don’t worry, I’m definitely not giving the secret away. Maybe I ruined it with all my guessing because some how it was not as shocking as I thought it would be (confused yet? If so, GOOD! It’ll be better that way, I promise). But anyway, it’s a very interesting concept and one that’s highly controversial and morally questionable to let Jenna live like that.

Well. I don’t really want to say much more about the plot itself. I want to shroud it in mystery because I think it makes for a better book if you don’t know everything that’s going on – It really lets you get inside Jenna’s head and understand her thoughts and feelings better.

I loved Jenna’s relationship with her grandma. You really see grandma Lily struggling to make something out of Jenna after the accident/coma — We start off by thinking it’s because she made her peace with the fact that she was going to die and said her goodbyes, and then the relationship starts to soften and develop, and Grandma really becomes a friend as well as guidance in life after the accident. I think Lily is my favorite character in the whole book.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing, but as I was reading I thought that maybe it was intentional. Jenna’s narration seems so cold, mostly unfeeling. Very straight-forward and almost simplistic. I felt like there were a lot of lack of natural things like contractions and similes, etc — parts of our lexicon that we use all the time, but now that I’m thinking about it, kind of brilliant to really break it down to how simply Jenna is thinking. She’s pretty messed up and obviously different since the accident and waking up from the coma, so I think that’s all part of starting over. She’s trying to re-find herself as she develops new memories and remembers the old. You can see the stark difference in the emotion of Jenna’s mom as well as a few of the kids from her new school. They clearly have a lot of emotion whereas Jenna is still working all of it out for herself.

As we learned more about what was really going on, we really got pushed to the moral and social issues behind the story, and that I enjoyed. There are some parts of the book that really make you think, “If this was really happening, how would I feel about it?” and sometimes I just didn’t know. It got set up for a second book (and I know there’s one out there), but not quite sure how I’ll feel about that, but it still really does sound interesting.

4/5 stars
I raced through the beginning at a 5 star pace, then kind of slowed down to 3, then back up to 4, so 4 stars it is!