My latest reading adventure has been The Adoration of Jenna Fox. The novel is about Jenna Fox, a 17 year old girl who has just awakened from a year-long coma caused by a terrible car accident. She struggles to remember anything--she is completely blank. She can't even remember her parents--she just knows that they're her parents. That's about it. They have given her a selection of home videos from before her accident so that hopefully they will jog her memory and she will recover as quickly as possible. She and her family formerly lived in Boston, but have moved to a small town in California for reasons unknown until the middle of the book.
Jenna struggles to find out who she really is and struggles to get to know herself. But, she tries to adjust to her new life in the best way she can. She ventures out into the open and meets some of her neighbors, much to her mother's and grandmother's discontent. She even starts going to school and makes new friends.
One day, though, when Jenna is creeping around her new house, she cuts herself, and it's a very deep gash as well. She finds bizarre, blue gel underneath her skin and immediately confronts her Mom about it. Her mom quickly calls her dad over from Boston and they explain what the blue gel is for. Jenna learns the shocking truth about herself: she is artificial. The surgeons and doctors could only salvage 10 percent of her brain. According to her dad, that 10 percent is "the most important part". It turns out that the blue gel is actually not medically approved yet, and they used it on her anyways. So technically, she is illegal. After learning this, Jenna can barely stand the shock. She finds herself looking at the word thinking that she is "artificial", even though everything is the same as it was before she found all of this out. As a reader, I thought that this book was very monotonous at the beginning, but I continued reading it because I thought I should give it a chance. I have a habit of abandoning books based solely on first impressions, but I didn't want to do that this time. As I progressed deeper into the book, it got a lot more enjoyable and suspenseful, and now I'm enjoying reading it.
I especially enjoy the author's (Mary E. Pearson) writing craft. She uses many different syntactical techniques in her writing. She clumps collections of short sentences together and sometimes she uses very long sentences. At the most dramatic points in the novel, the syntax helps make them even more dramatic. Since the book is first person, she also uses the right voice that a 17 year old would use.
One of the main themes that I have taken away from the novel so far is that one doesn't always know themselves as well as they think they do. Once in a while, everybody should reflect on who they really are and what they really want, which is not always what everybody else wants. Everybody is their own, individual person and everyone should embrace that fact.
I absolutely can't wait to see what happens next in the novel!
