The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)
The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a 2008 science fiction book written by Mary E. Pearson.
Jenna Fox wakes from a year-long coma with almost nothing left of herself. She is seventeen, or so she is told, and the girl in the family videos feels like a stranger she is meant to become. Her parents hover and deflect. Her grandmother watches her with something close to fear. As Jenna replays her old life frame by frame and pushes at the gaps in her memory, the careful story her family keeps telling begins to fray. Mary E. Pearson writes a quiet, unnerving near-future novel about identity, medicine, and how much of a person can be remade.
Quick answers
What is The Adoration of Jenna Fox about?
Jenna Fox wakes from a year-long coma with almost nothing left of herself. She is seventeen, or so she is told, and the girl in the family videos feels like a stranger she is meant to become. Her parents hover and deflect. Her grandmother watches her with something close to fear. As Jenna replays her old life frame by frame and pushes at the gaps in her memory, the careful story her family keeps telling begins to fray. Mary E. Pearson writes a quiet, unnerving near-future novel about identity, medicine, and how much of a person can be remade.
When was The Adoration of Jenna Fox published?
The Adoration of Jenna Fox was published in 2008.
Who made The Adoration of Jenna Fox?
The Adoration of Jenna Fox was written by Mary E. Pearson.
Similar books
Explore The Adoration of Jenna Fox guides
The Adoration of Jenna Fox in our writing
A few thoughts on The Adoration of Jenna Fox
The game SOMA turns Jenna's central question, what survives when a mind is copied and a body rebuilt, into dread you can walk through. Never Let Me Go, the film, shares the hush and the ethical ache, following young people raised for reasons no one will say aloud. Both suit readers unsettled by how tenderly this book handles a terrible idea.
Near-future medical sci-fi about how much of a person can be remade
The Adoration of Jenna Fox never says exactly how much of Jenna survived her rebuilding, only that her family flinches at the question. Soma and Old Man's War ask the same thing about a mind poured into a different body, Never Let Me Go does it through quiet institutional dread, and Uglies turns mandatory surgery into a whole society's answer.
Dystopian coming-of-age stories about discovering the memories your world erased
Jenna spends the whole book replaying home movies to relearn a life her parents keep editing around her. The Giver hides its whole society's memory in one person's head, The Scorch Trials sends its cast forward with holes where their past should be, and Chaos Walking and Silo both build worlds that survive by making sure nobody remembers what actually happened.
Cyberpunk and sci-fi about rebuilding a body and wondering what didn't survive the process
The whole unease of Jenna Fox comes from a rebuilt body that looks and acts like her but can't fully prove it's still her. Ghost in the Shell built an entire cyberpunk mythology out of that same doubt, Appleseed and Bio Booster Armor Guyver armor their casts in bodies that aren't quite flesh anymore, and Mass Effect 2 resurrects its hero piece by piece and never lets her forget it.