The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson (Henry Holt, 2008) is a fantastic young adult book–a sci-fi novel that has the creepy thrill of a scary movie.  Teenager Jenna Fox wakes from a coma to discover that she remembers nothing of her past.  She has to relearn how to talk, walk, eat, live.  Her adoring parents have taken video after video of her childhood, and Jenna watches old family movies of herself in an attempt to discover who she is, or at least who she was. 

But bit by bit, Jenna realizes things don’t add up.  Her parents are lying to her.  She senses that her once loving grandmother is hostile.  Jenna tries to search online about herself and her accident only to find that her parents have locked it so she can’t access the information. 

The novel is set in a futuristic California where super-bacteria have become completely resistant to antibiotics.  Bio-engineering has developed dramatic medical solutions to try to save lives.  But at what cost?  Just how far should you go to save someone you love?

As Jenna searches for answers, she finds herself coming up with more and more questions:  ”Who am I?”  “What is a soul?”  “Do I even have one?”  “What does it mean to be human?”  “What makes me, me?”

I don’t want to spoil the surprises so I will say no more.   But in The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Mary Pearson has written an amazing story where age-old questions about identity and love weave seamlessly into a futuristic dystopia where the definition of humanity itself is on the line.