The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson is yet another teen novel exploring ideas about death, life and what it means to be human.
Seventeen-year-old Jenna Angeline Fox has been in a coma for a year after an accident. In that time a second woman has been elected president, a twelfth planet has been discovered in the solar system, and the last polar bear has died. The first few days her mind and body thrashed out of control but her mind settled followed by her body. Each day Jenna improved: at first she couldn't walk and then she could, one day she couldn't speak the next day she could.
On the eighth day her father had to return to work in Boston but he tells Jenna that gradually things will improve. While jenna believes physically she is fine, she doesn't remember her mother, father or Lily who is her Nana.She doesn't remember Boston, or the accident which happened a year ago.
During the first week she's awake, Jenna's mother reviews her childhood, things like childhood pets, family vacations, and favourite books. But Jenna cannot remember any of them. She knows she should love her mother but she feels nothing because she doesn't know or remember her.
To help her, Jenna's mother gives her a box of discs to watch that are recordings of her life before the accident. Her Nana, Lily suggests she not watch them in chronological order but that she watch the one from last year. However, Jenna decides that she will watch them in order, from when she was a fetus. However, Jenna begins to feel curious. Why can she remember facts about the French Revolution but cannot remember if she has a best friend?
On Day Sixteen her mother leaves the house to go into town. She works as a restoration consultant and is interviewing workers. In Boston her speciality was restoring brownstones but California doesn't have brownstones. Instead she's focusing on restoring the Cotswold cottage that they now live in. Jenna's mother tells her not to leave the house. As her mother is leaving, Jenna asks her first question and that is why they moved to California if their careers were both in Boston? Jenna's mother states that it was to give her a quiet place to recover, but to Jenna, the response is practiced and seems "smooth".
Jenna begins to have many questions. She has been sick for a year and yet there are no cards from friends, and her Netbook never buzzes. Did she have any friends? While her Nana cooks in the kitchen, janna manages to sneak out of the house. Outside the house looks dilapidated with the top bricks of the fireplace bumbled down, and several windows in the garage house boarded up. Behind the house the lawn slopes down to the pond and beyond it is their neighbour, Mr. Bender's property. To the north of the pond is a forest of eucalyptus trees. Jenna crosses the stream that feeds into the pond and walks up Mr. Bender's back yard. Jenna wants to speak with somone outside her small family circle.
He introduces himself as Clayton Bender and tells Jenna her hands are like ice. Jenna learns that Mr. Bender is a well-known environmental artist whose works can be found in major office buildings and doctors' offices. Strangely, although Jenna doesn't know about him, she does know detailed facts about the last earthquake in California. Mr. Bender tells Jenna that he was happy to see her family moving in "a couple of weeks ago". As she's walking back from Mr. Bender's yard, Jenna slips and falls, cutting her knee. Although Jenna thought she was drowning in the pond she is not wet when Lily helps her.
At home that evening Jenna learns that she did drown when she wasn't even two years old after falling off a dock chasing white gulls. Her mother is thrilled because this means her memory is returning. Gradually Jenna remembers her friends, Kara and Locke but this leads to even more questions. On an outing with Lily, Jenna learns that her father started his own biotech company called BioGel. His company has allowed organs slated for transplantation to be stored indefinitely. When Jenna questions Lily about knowing the neighbours, Lily confirms what Mr. Bender told her - that they have only been here for two weeks. This is suspicious to Jenna who wonders, "After I spent a year in a coma, how could they have predicted exactly when i would wake up and then move to California precisely at that time? Was it only coincidence? Or did they decide when I would wake up?"
Lily takes Jenna to the San Rey mission. Inside the church, Jenna remember her own baptism when she was an infant, something that would normally be impossible. While Lily talks with Father Rico, Jenna comes to learn that the two belong to the World Seed Preservation Organization which is "committed to preserving original species of plants." Bio-engineering and the resulting cross-pollination has meant there are few original plant species left. The feel that these bio-engineered plants are time-bombs similar to the Aureus epidemic that killed Jenna's grandfather and millions of people.
At home Jenna asks to go to school but is adamantly refused by her mother who orders her to her room. Jenna is furious but is compelled to do as her mother tells her. Sitting on the stairs she overhears her mother and Lily arguing, with Lily asking Jenna's mom, Claire, when she will admit to having made a mistake.
Jenna continues to watch the discs which detail her life, while the work goes on around their home. While watching a video of herself at ten years of age, Jenna notices a thin red scar under her chin. A quick check in the mirror reveals the scar doesn't exist. Then one morning Jenna learns that she will be able to attend a local charter school that is within walking distance. This surprises Jenna as her mother was determined she not return to school.
Jenna decides to visit Clayton Bender and at his home she reveals what she's learned about him on the Net. Clayton Bender confirms that he is not the real Clayton Bender who would now be well over eighty years old. Instead he reveals that he worked for Clayton for three years and then took on the identity of Clayton after he suddenly died. Clayton tells Jenna that she was in a very serious car accident and that her situation was considered grave.
While watching a video of herself at the beach, Jenna suddenly remembers several weeks of memories and that she loves hot chocolate with marshmallows. But when she makes some and tries to drink it, her mother screams at her. The hot chocolate has no taste. Jenna begins attending a nearby charter school where there are only a handful of students. Dr. Rae is the director and the principal instructor. Jenna meets Ethan who is the boy she saw at the mission, Allys who has two artificial legs and replacement hands which she lost from a bacterial infection, Gabriel who has an anxiety disorder and prefers a smaller class and Dane. The school has a system of teacher-collaborators: Ethan is teacher-collaborator for literature, Gabriel is teacher-collaborator for logic and problem-solving, Dane does art, while Allys leads on science and ethics. Jenna is assigned history.
It is Allys who provides Jenna with some crucial information one day when they pick her up from her volunteer work. Allys volunteers for the Del Oro Ethics Task Force. Allys feels that her situation developed due to "an out-of-control medical system" and she wants to ensure "that no new medical injustices will be unleashed on the world." She tells Jenna and Ethan that the Federal Science Ethics Board (FSEB) runs the ethics task force. They control what research and medical procedures can be done and are able to shut down any research and even whole hospitals. Allys tells Jenna that BioGel is responsible for the FSEB being formed. They created biogel which is a blue gel that is "artificially oxygenated and loaded with neurochips". Allys explains that they are smaller than the human cell and can communicate like neurons but faster, and once uploaded with basic information are able to pass on that information and specialize. She states that just because this can be done doesn't mean it should be. So the FSEB restricts how much of a human can be replaced or enhanced. Allys explains to Ethan that "They're trying to preserve our humanity..."
This encounter sets the stage for what comes next. After watching the last disc featuring her life at age sixteen, a year before her accident, Jenna decides to investigate the small room off of her mother's bedroom. She had found a key to that locked room earlier in the day and desperate to learn what is behind the locked door, Jenna enters and finds three computers. But when she attempts to remove the computer from its steel brackets securing it to the table, Jenna badly cuts her hand. To her shock, Jenna discovers that despite the large gash, there is almost no pain and very little blood. What there is however, is not human. "The skin, lies on a thick layer of blue. Blue gel. Beneath that is the silvery white glimmer of synthetic bone and ligaments. Plastic? Mental composite?"
Horrified, Jenna learns from her mother that her body is not real and that only ten percent of her brain - the butterfly part, was saved. Filled with anger and shock, she must now deal with her new self. But what is she exactly?
Discussion
The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a young adult novel that explores what makes us human - our minds, our souls, our bodies, all? or some combination? and the bioethics of extraordinary measures to save a life.
Sixteen-year-old Jenna Fox was in a serious accident that left her badly burned, with infection and massive organ failure setting in. In a desperate attempt to save their very-much-adored daughter, Matthew and Claire Fox uss the banned biogel that BioGel and Fox Bio Systems had developed. Jenna doesn't know all of this and instead awakens a year later when she is seventeen-years-old. She is provided very few details and has few memories of her life a year ago.
But Jenna immediately senses that things are not as they should be. Her mother had a career as a restoration consultant whose focus was on brownstones but now has no career. Her Nana, Lily was chief of internal medicine at Boston University Hospital. "It seems that everyone in this house is reinventing themselves and no one is who they once were."
And it's not just her family's unusual situation. She begins to notice that things seem to be off about herself too. She notices that the birds in Clayton Bender's backyard will not feed out of her hand. -Jenna feels compelled to obey her mother when she doesn't want to. "What world have I woken up to? What nightmare am I in? Why am I compelled to do as Mother says even when I have a desperate need to do something else? " First with Clayton Bender and then at school Jenna finds herself having detailed knowledge about specific topics like Easter Island and Walden - who she can recite word for word. Her favourite drink, hot chocolate has no taste. She learns at school that her walk is "funny". When she tries to interlace her hands, Jenna feels "like the hands I am lacing are not my own, like I have borrowed them from a twelve-fingered monster." As Jenna is working in the garden at the mission with Ethan she is certain she can hear the choir boys singing but he tells her they are too far away. And Jenna doesn't tire while shoveling dirt in the garden for hours but Ethan is exhausted.
Even the recovery of her memory seems unusual to Jenna. "It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click, into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere...." As her memories come back in bits, Jenna wonders if it will take her lifetime to reclaim them all.
Pearson foreshadows the coming ethical dilemma through the character of Allys who has lost her limbs to a bacterial infection. She uses prosthetic legs but her replacement arms and hands are bioengineered. Allys is against the technology that Fox Biosystems and their BioGel have created, arguing that this is not "natural" and that there should be limits on how much of a human can be replaced or enhanced.
When Jenna accidentally discovers that she is the biogel that Allys mentioned, she is horrified. Her father explains, "Your body was injured beyond saving. We had to patch together a new one. Your skeletal structure was replicated. You have all the bone structure of a normal teenage girl. Muscle areas are taken up with additional modified Bio Gel. Most movement is accomplished through digital signals within the bone structure.Some is accomplished through the traditional method of cabled ligaments.Your skin was replaced. Your brain, the ten percent we saved, was infused with additional Bio Gel. " He also tells her that additional scans were made of her brain and uploaded what constitutes Jenna's mind. Jenna's father also explains that they have taken the butterfly of her brain and surrounded it with a sphere of Bio Gel and that the neural chips are building new pathways for her brain to access information.
This shocks Jenna. "I shudder, repulsed at everything I may or may not be, wanting to escape but trapped again. By what? Myself? I don't know who or what I am anymore." She wonders about her heart and her lungs. And why she's remembering events like her baptism that she shouldn't. "He's tampered with the unknown. What door has he opened?" Her father also reveals that the Bio Gel best functions at a stable temperature and that its "shelf life" is reduced under cold conditions. Not only is Jenna "illegal" but she learns she has a shelf life between two and two hundred years, depending on the climate she lives in. It means Jenna will never grow old. She learns other specifics, that she has no stomach and a primitive digestive system. tells her father she doesn't even know if she's human.
"What about a soul, Father? When you were so busy implanting all your neural chips, did you think about that? Did you snip my soul from my old body, too? Where did you put it? Show me! Where? Where in all this groundbreaking technology did you insert my soul?"
While her parents continue to focus on the biological, Jenna is more focused on her nature: is she human. When her nana reveals that before the accident Jenna and her motehr were arguing and that she didn't go to her room but left the house in a car that she couldn't drive, Jenna understands why she was compelled to now obey her mother: they have programmed her brain to respond to their commands. Her parents reveal that they have uploaded subliminal messages, and her entire tenth to twelfth grade curriculum which explains why she knows so much about random topics. But Jenna knows they still are not telling her everything because when she attempts to research her accident on her Netbook she is denied access. So she turns to Clayton Bender. On his Netbook Jenna learns the shocking truth: her friends Locke Jenkins died two weeks after the accident without regaining consciousness, and Kara Manning died three weeks after from severe head trauma. The cause of the accident was believed to be high speed and reckless driving.
Jenna's journey to self-acceptance begins while she's reading Walden. She realizes those thoughts about the work are her own and exist no where else in the universe. She is thankful to be experiencing these thoughts despite the cost.She also makes the discovery that her parents have scanned Kara and Locke's brains but were unable to get skin and DNA samples so they cannot be replicated like Jenna. Eventually Jenna decides to deal with this problem on her own.
The title comes from what Jenna finally realizes as she watches the videos of herself at age sixteen."I have more holes than substance, but I've pieced together a girl with the scatter of memories that have come back to me, and a life recorded beyond reason. I was treasured. Adored. Smothered with hopes. I was everything three babies could have been. I danced as hard as I could. Studied as hard. Played as hard. Practiced as hard. I pushed to be everything they dreamed I could be." Jenna was so adored that her parents could bear the thought of her dying. And so they did whatever it took to prevent that regardless of the cost.
But for the new Jenna the problem still exists. "There were so many things Mother and Father always wanted me to be...Now they want me to be just what I was before. I'm not. No matter how much they want it, or how much I want it, I can't make that happen. The feeling of failure is familiar.I always tried so hard to be everything they wanted. Everything three babies could be. Their miracle child.Me. Now ai am a different kind of miracle. The artificial freak kind."
However, Lily challenges Jenna to determine what she wants. "You've always been two people. The Jenna who wants to please and the Jenna who secretly resents it. They won't break, you know. Your parents never thought you were perfect. You did." However, Jenna points out that they did have the expectation of perfection because she was tutored and coached whenever it was required. "I've been under a microscope my entire life! From the moment I was conceived, I had to be everything because I was their miracle! That's what I had to live up to every day of my life!" Jenna tells her mother, "I don't want to be your miracle anymore. I can't be your miracle anymore. I need to be here on this planet with the same odds as everyone else. I need to be like everyone else... I can't be really alive if I can't die too." Jenna remembers seeing her mother at her bedside after the accident and wanting her to let her die but knowing that her mother would never do that because she was forever her miracle.
Eventually Jenna does seem to come to self-acceptance and to accept that this new technology may help save lives. When her friend Allys begins to die, she reveals what Jenna is to her parents in the hopes that they and Jenna's parents will save her with the same technology that saved Jenna. It is eventually revealed that Jenna lives much longer than her father believed - at two hundred and sixty years later she is still alive. But she has also made the decision to not outlive her daughter, Kayla, that one day she will travel to Boston with its cold winters, so that her body will begin to shut down. Immortality is not something she wants.
The novel has hints of religious undertones: Jenna's grandmother, Lily is a Catholic who prays, is involved in the nearby mission of San Luis Ray and attends Sunday Mass. Yet she had Claire via "in vitro" which Catholic moral teaching forbids. However it is clear that Lily was very much against what her daughter and son-in-law were going to do with Jenna. It is also implied that Claire had three "in vitro" pregnancies, of which Jenna was the only surviving baby - Claire's miracle. Jenna remembers her baptism but when she's in the church with her Nana she has no memory of how genuflect and to cross herself - a common Catholic custom showing respect for the Blessed Sacrament. This lack of "Catholic memory" is evident when Jenna and Ethan are in the mission church. Both are in the sanctuary, an area that is considered sacred and kiss there. This is a sacriligeous (and somewhat offensive) scene and it's puzzling as to why Pearson would have written this into her novel. Jenna goes to the church because she is struggling to determine if she has a soul and if not, what has happened to that part of her. This was a missed opportunity in the novel to explore this question more deeply and in a way that was not so off-putting to young Catholic readers. Jenna never really broaches this question with her parents or her grandmother. Lily, who has known Father Rico for a long time, could have brought her granddaughter to talk to this priest and he may have offered Jenna some perspective. The question is left largely unanswered: Jenna has a mostly man-made body with some genetic material and the essence of her mind. But does she have a soul? The novel ends with Lily blessing Jenna with holy water, telling her that she believes Jenna has a soul.
The novel generally ties up all the loose ends in a way that is clean and clear cut. Jenna remembers what happened to her and her friends, she begins to accept herself and what was done to her, she destroys the computers saving her friends from the same fate, and her parents seem prepared to help Allys's parents save their daughter. The Epilogue gives the reader closure, two hundred and sixty years into the future. Based on the scene in the church, this reviewer has reservations about this novel.
Book details:
The adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
Henry Holt and Company 2008
266pp
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