Update: "The Adoration of Jenna Fox", by Mary E. Pearson

**Slight Spoilers!**

I'm currently reading The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. So far, I love this book. It's very detail oriented and poetic. It's sci-fi, but has the emotional levels of the realistic fiction book. I love the almost child-like view of the world by Jenna too. It makes the book more and more interesting to read with a character who has a blank slate, and is literally developing before your eyes.

One thing I find really intriguing is the mystery surrounding Jenna Fox's past. Her family refuses to tell her anything, she abruptly relocated right after the accident, was seemingly in a medically induced coma most of her coma, and was awakened at a specific time. This makes the book another level to me, because besides having an interesting premise and being futuristic, it has mystery.

One theory I have about the secrecy about Jenna's past is that the Jenna Fox who is narrating the story is a clone saved at last minute after the accident. The original Jenna is dead, and her brain has been put into the new cloned Jenna (to keep personality), being sustained by using BioGel.

The first thing that led me to this is that on page 31 of the book, Jenna's mother starts to talk about miracles. She says as speaking to her mother, Lily, "Stop! You of all people should understand. If it wasn't for invitro, I wouldn't be here. You always called me your miracle. Why can't I have one too? When do you get to decide when the miracles end?" Though I'm not sure what "invitro" is, I think we can assume it's some technological or medical breakthrough for saving lives in the future, as it saved Jenna's mother's, Claire's, life. Lily continues to say that Jenna is "Not natural." Now why would a grandmother say this about her granddaughter unless she thought she was altered in some way that made her radically different from everyone else? Like cloning.

Also, Lily often talks about how she accepts when she will die around Jenna, something she never says around her daughter, Claire, meaning that she thought Claire should accept losses, possibly of Jenna. At first, I just interpreted this as Jenna losing so much as her life, and not remembering anything, and the random ominous conversation because Lily was kind of random, but as I read on, I saw more and more odd evidence, leaving me to the cloning conclusion.

For instance, the present-day Jenna doesn't have a scar, as she saw in the video of her as a ten year old. A large and obvious scar would at least be slightly visible only ten years later. If a cloned body was made of Jenna, without all her injuries, the scar wouldn't be present. Another reason why I think this is that none of Jenna's friends have tried to contact her. This shows that in the very least, her Claire and Lily, almost abducted Jenna away from her old life in Boston, cutting all connections. Even if this explanation was true, this would raise more questions. If her friends believed her to be dead, then they wouldn't try to find her, or talk to her, right?

Also, when Allys is talking about the control of the school, she leads to the "Federal Science Ethics Board." Through the conversation, she clearly states human cloning was attempted and succeeded. She also expresses her disstress over how far human preservation will go, and how it at one point just becomes too unnatural, which shows some people share a view with Lily. The thing that interested me most was that human brains are the most taboo and expensive organ to be transplanted.

Allys says that "Only biodigital enhancement up to forty-nine percent is allowed to restore some lost function and that's it." This would explain why Jenna lost much of her personality, and all of her memories. On how her family got the permission to take the brain from old-Jenna's body, her father invented BioGel. Lily stated that Jenna's family was "filthy rich", which would probably cover the brain, and be enough to pay to get Jenna cloned and her brain to be put "on ice", so to speak, with BioGel. Who knows, Jenna could even be experimental, which would explain the man at the church spying and photographing her when she was with Ethan.

All this compiled just make me more and more confident that Jenna is some sort of clone. This book makes me excited to read it, and I can't wait to finish it and see what really happened, and see if I got it right.