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A review by trin
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
2.0
Teenage Jenna wakes up after an accident with no memory of who she is—though she knows all of [a: Thoreau|10264|Henry David Thoreau|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392432620p2/10264.jpg]’s [b: Walden|16902|Walden|Henry David Thoreau|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1465675526s/16902.jpg|2361393] by heart. As quickly becomes apparent, what’s going on is far more complex than a case of simple old amnesia! Jenna’s slow investigation into what really happened to her ensues.
I was disappointed by this. I said “slow investigation” above because I found the pacing almost glacial: the narrative slinks along, gradually uncovering twists that utterly failed to surprise me. It doesn’t help that the first person POV was entirely affectless; I understand that this may have been partially intentional and dictated by the plot, but I found it very dull to read. Jenna might have amnesia, but I felt like I had déjà vu: I’ve just read too many other similar stories. This one needed to have something to distinguish itself, to make it stand out, but aside from some mildly interesting ideas about future issues with science and technology, there just wasn’t anything new here. I appreciate that Pearson was trying to convey some real ideas about what it means to be human, but her characters were too two-dimensional for her message to have any effect on me. And I really, really hated the trite epilogue—it seemed very fake, and cheapened the sense of realism that the rest of the narrative was at least striving for.
[Insert painfully obvious joke about not adoring Jenna Fox at all here]
I was disappointed by this. I said “slow investigation” above because I found the pacing almost glacial: the narrative slinks along, gradually uncovering twists that utterly failed to surprise me. It doesn’t help that the first person POV was entirely affectless; I understand that this may have been partially intentional and dictated by the plot, but I found it very dull to read. Jenna might have amnesia, but I felt like I had déjà vu: I’ve just read too many other similar stories. This one needed to have something to distinguish itself, to make it stand out, but aside from some mildly interesting ideas about future issues with science and technology, there just wasn’t anything new here. I appreciate that Pearson was trying to convey some real ideas about what it means to be human, but her characters were too two-dimensional for her message to have any effect on me. And I really, really hated the trite epilogue—it seemed very fake, and cheapened the sense of realism that the rest of the narrative was at least striving for.
[Insert painfully obvious joke about not adoring Jenna Fox at all here]