Seventeen year old Jenna awakens from a coma following a car accident with no memory of her past life.However, she has many questions: How can she remember events from when she was a baby and quote long passages from Thoreau when her own body is unfamiliar?Why did her family move suddenly from Boston to California?What is the reason her grandmother, who adored her in videos, does not like her now?When a minor mishap compels Jenna to demand the truth, she learns the answers to her questions, but is now troubled by even more disturbing ones. 272 pages
Contributed by B. Karp
*****
How much can you retain of your physical self before you're not "you" anymore? Eighty percent? Fifty percent? Ten percent? And if you had only a certain percentage of yourself left, is your soul still intact?
Jenna Fox has been adored and loved by her parents since she was a baby. Every step she made, every accomplishment she's ever done has been recorded on video - and Jenna watches every year she was alive, up to her sixteenth year. The thing is, she can't remember anything she watches.
Jenna wakes up from a coma after a year and her life and memory has altered. Her diet is different, her grandmother pushes her out of arms' reach, and her mother has become more protective than ever. All Jenna wants is a normal life, and the first step is going back to school.
There she meets several "outcasts" in an alternative school, where the big topics are Thoreaus' Walden Pond and the responsibility of the FSEB, the Federal Science Ethics Board.
Jenna slowly begins to recall memories and she struggles to find out what happened her seventeenth year. And then it hits her - the accident, the smell of death, her wanting to die - and the secret her parents have been keeping from her comes out. JWhat she finds out is that the only part of her is the true Jenna Fox - the rest of lab-created. Jenna doesn't know what she is - human or a science project.
Set in the future, this book deals with the possibility of science and medicine and what happens when science begins to slowly take over. It's a world of mutations, medical advances and questions of how far is too far? A crisp-written book that will make the reader wonder what will happen to Jenna and how she handles her life inside her own skin or as an back-up in a computer. Do memories make a person, or is it more than that?
Recommended by: Naomi Bates, Librarian, Texas USA