I curled up with Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox on a blustery Sunday afternoon, and I remained curled up, eagerly flipping page after page until the late, late hours of Sunday night. Yep, I read this book in a day because it's that good.How far will a parent go for a child? This question drives the plot of the story. The book would fit well in a unit that examines how parents are people, too. In his book A Sympathetic Understanding of the Child: Birth to Sixteen (1995), David Elkind asserts that a major developmental characteristic of teens ages 12-15 is the ability to begin to see their parents as people and think critically about them despite their continued dependence on them.
Jenna Fox should have died in a car accident. Her two friends, who were also involved in the car accident, were killed. However, Jenna's father owns one of the most powerful bio-engineering firms in the world in this futuristic novel, and he is able to "save" her. The "saved" Jenna is 10% human. The rest of her is bio-engineered. The love for Jenna is unquestionable, but her parents' decision warrants discussion about whether parents can adore children too much.
The book also addresses the need to negotiate distance from parents. Jenna has always wanted to please her parents, causing her to stifle her own desires and beliefs, but after the accident, Jenna is forced to come into her own. She not only identifies what she wants, but she comes to live by her own standards. Obviously, ethics in both the technology and medical fields are also discussion-worthy topics in the book.
The book would be appropriate for grades 7-9, but I would save it for advanced readers in the 7th grade. There's no sex, alcohol, or swearing, topics which I know can be of major concern to some parents. I would recommend pairing this book with The Compound by S.A. Bodeen, which offers a male protagonist to the boys in the classroom.
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