The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Title: The Adoration of Jenna Fox 
Author: Mary E. Pearson
Published: April 2008
ISBN: 0805076689
Page Number: 266
Price: $16.95
Reading Level: 6th grade
Interest Level: 10th grade and up
Other books in the series: The Fox Inheritance
Awards: Golden Kite Award for Fiction (2009)
Genre: Sci-fi
Plot Summary: Seventeen year old Jenna Fox awakes from a coma not knowing who she is or what happened to her. Her parents tell her that she was in a terrible accident that killed her two best friends and that she is lucky to be alive. As Jenna's memories start to come back to her Jenna realizes that something is wrong. Her memories feel all wrong and her parents are not acting right. They seem to be hiding something from Jenna but what? When Jenna starts to search for answers she may not like what she finds. She will soon start to question who she is and just how far her parents went to save her. But have her parents gone too far?
Critical Review: The book asks a lot of big questions, like what makes us human? How far should a parent go to save their child? Should their be restrictions on what science can do to save a human? It really does bring up many talking points. It also shows Jenna's struggle with what her parents did to her. She is disgusted when she thinks about how all her memories were placed on disc till her parents could repair her body. The desperation of her parents is shown through their illegal act to keep Jenna alive yet the author shows that while the acts were illegal her parents did it out of love.
Reader's Annotation: Jenna awakes not knowing who she is or what happened to her. Apparently, Jenna was in a horrible accident that she is still recovering from but Jenna feels like something else happened. When her memories start to come back they don't seem right, so Jenna starts to search for the truth but she may not like what she finds.
Book Talk Ideas: The book deals a lot with ethics and what it is that makes us human. Jenna struggles with being alive and what her parents did to keep her alive. I think the book talk should focus on that idea. What would you do to stay alive or to keep a love one alive? What makes us human, is it our memories or is it something more?
Main Themes: ethics, death, science
Issues: There is a lot of talk of ethically choices and how far science should go to prolong a life or save a person.
Bibliotherapeutic usefulness: Jenna struggles a lot with her parents quest for a perfect daughter. I think that teens who have this same pressure at home could gain a lot from Jenna's personal struggle. It also has readers thinking about what makes a person human and how far they would go to keep someone alive. There book serves as a great discussion starter on some difficult topics of death, science and ethics.
Read alikes: The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, Across the Universe by Beth Revis, Matched by Allyson Condie
Author Website: http://www.marypearson.com/
Profession Reviews: Publisher's Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
Why include this book? The book is both sci-fi and mystery and has the reader turngin pages to find out what really happend to Jenna. It is also very relevant with discussion going on right now about the place of science in keeping people alive.