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coraaThe Adoration of Jenna Fox
, by Mary Pearson
When Jenna Fox awakens from a year-long coma, her parents reassure her that everything will be fine, and her memories will return. But even from the start, Jenna knows that something is wrong. Why can she remember recent history with textbook precision, but know nothing of her best friends? Why did her family move abruptly from Boston to California—leaving behind not only careers and friends but also most of their possessions? Why can her grandmother not stand even to be around her?
If you're irritated because you've figured out the twist from my summary, have no fear: I figured out the twist within the first ten pages, and I'm terrible at figuring out plot twists, so you're not spoiled in any meaningful way. This isn't a book where figuring out the mystery is the key: the mystery is revealed before the halfway point. It's a book where it's not the secret but the crashing aftermath of the secret's revelation is the point.
This is a book for you if you've ever read Gift of the Magi and thought, "Okay, so she doesn't have her hair and he doesn't have his watch—what does that mean for their lives, their relationships, their self-definitions?"
Making Jenna sympathetic is quite a task, because she starts out blank: an amnesiac with no idea who she is. And I'm not a big fan of blank female characters. (Confession: Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion bugs the snot out of me, because there's no there there. And she's a fan favorite, but I can't... give me shouty Asuka any day; at least she's got something going on inside her head.) But, although Jenna starts out pretty blank and remains pretty helpless, I liked her a lot because she was smart and determined to figure out what was going on, and acted within her very limited circumstances to change her future. Which I appreciate a great deal.
The rest I have to say is spoilery, so, cut.
The most evocative part of this for me was Jenna's reminiscences of the hellish experience of "living" on the hard drive. In the book, consciousness is something that can only exist in an active state; a brain preserved on a hard drive has to keep thinking in order to retain what we'd think of as a mind, vs. a collection of static data. So when Jenna's consciousness is preserved in between her accident and her artificial body being ready, she's preserved as a conscious, thinking mind on a hard drive. But the mind-on-the-hard-drive is in the most profound and extreme of sensory deprivation, because it has no body to feel with, and that sensory deprivation is a hell of cold and silence in which one cannot so much as scream.
Later in the book, Jenna finds out that another copy of herself is still spinning and thinking and going insane on hard drive, as are copies of her two (dead) best friends from her prior life. It was the very vividness of the depiction that made me feel that the scene where she destroyed the three brain-backups by throwing them in a pond (with the help of her grandmother Lily, who started out as an antagonist and gradually became her closest ally) was the emotional climax of the book, and a very satisfying one. Unfortunately, since I felt that was the emotional climax, the culminating scenes with Allys felt tacked-on. I appreciated them! But I wasn't sure what the epilogue brought that hadn't already been explored.
Recommended. And if you get impatient with the fact that you figure things out before Jenna, remember: that's not the point.
, by Mary PearsonWhen Jenna Fox awakens from a year-long coma, her parents reassure her that everything will be fine, and her memories will return. But even from the start, Jenna knows that something is wrong. Why can she remember recent history with textbook precision, but know nothing of her best friends? Why did her family move abruptly from Boston to California—leaving behind not only careers and friends but also most of their possessions? Why can her grandmother not stand even to be around her?
If you're irritated because you've figured out the twist from my summary, have no fear: I figured out the twist within the first ten pages, and I'm terrible at figuring out plot twists, so you're not spoiled in any meaningful way. This isn't a book where figuring out the mystery is the key: the mystery is revealed before the halfway point. It's a book where it's not the secret but the crashing aftermath of the secret's revelation is the point.
This is a book for you if you've ever read Gift of the Magi and thought, "Okay, so she doesn't have her hair and he doesn't have his watch—what does that mean for their lives, their relationships, their self-definitions?"
Making Jenna sympathetic is quite a task, because she starts out blank: an amnesiac with no idea who she is. And I'm not a big fan of blank female characters. (Confession: Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion bugs the snot out of me, because there's no there there. And she's a fan favorite, but I can't... give me shouty Asuka any day; at least she's got something going on inside her head.) But, although Jenna starts out pretty blank and remains pretty helpless, I liked her a lot because she was smart and determined to figure out what was going on, and acted within her very limited circumstances to change her future. Which I appreciate a great deal.
The rest I have to say is spoilery, so, cut.
The most evocative part of this for me was Jenna's reminiscences of the hellish experience of "living" on the hard drive. In the book, consciousness is something that can only exist in an active state; a brain preserved on a hard drive has to keep thinking in order to retain what we'd think of as a mind, vs. a collection of static data. So when Jenna's consciousness is preserved in between her accident and her artificial body being ready, she's preserved as a conscious, thinking mind on a hard drive. But the mind-on-the-hard-drive is in the most profound and extreme of sensory deprivation, because it has no body to feel with, and that sensory deprivation is a hell of cold and silence in which one cannot so much as scream.
Later in the book, Jenna finds out that another copy of herself is still spinning and thinking and going insane on hard drive, as are copies of her two (dead) best friends from her prior life. It was the very vividness of the depiction that made me feel that the scene where she destroyed the three brain-backups by throwing them in a pond (with the help of her grandmother Lily, who started out as an antagonist and gradually became her closest ally) was the emotional climax of the book, and a very satisfying one. Unfortunately, since I felt that was the emotional climax, the culminating scenes with Allys felt tacked-on. I appreciated them! But I wasn't sure what the epilogue brought that hadn't already been explored.
Recommended. And if you get impatient with the fact that you figure things out before Jenna, remember: that's not the point.