90 pages 3 hours read

Mary E. Pearson

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008

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Section 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 1 Summary: California—A Question I Will Never Ask My Mother (pp. 3-17)

In a not-too-distant future, seventeen-year-old Jenna Fox awakens from a year-long coma to find she remembers nothing of her life. She does not remember her mother, father, or her grandmother, Lily, or the accident that landed her in the coma in the first place. She has forgotten many basic words and concepts and struggles to walk. She remembers the darkness and suffocation of the coma, but must rely on Mother, Father, and Lily to supply all other details. Day by day, Jenna’s health improves, as she learns how to walk and speak again, and looks up the words she has forgotten in the dictionary. Mother and Father are overjoyed by her progress, but Jenna notices that Lily keeps her distance. To help jog her memory, Mother encourages to Jenna to watch old home movies from when she was a child, in chronological order. Lily suggests Jenna watch the last disc first, but Jenna decides not to. Jenna begins to have questions about her life. Why does her family now live in California, when they used to live in Boston? Why did they move so far away when Father’s job and Jenna’s old doctors are in Boston? When Jenna asks Mother this, she evades the question.