Pearson, Mary E. (2008). The adoration of Jenna Fox. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Jenna Fox awoke from a coma only aware of two things: one, she had been in the coma for a year, and two, she was in an accident that she was not supposed to survive. Her parents had moved her from Boston to California, but she does not understand the reason, nor does she understand why her grandmother seems to dislike her. The details emerge slowly, like puzzle pieces fitting together, as Jenna watches the videos that her parents have taken of her life. She had friends in Boston, Kara and Locke. She was her parents' only child, their "miracle baby." Her father ran a company called Fox Biosystems.
The author never gives a year for the setting, but it seems to be a hundred years or so into the future. California has been devastated by an earthquake measuring over a 9 on the Richter scale, and subsequently rebuilt. The United States has gone through a Second Great Depression. Vaccines have been created for every illness imaginable--and resulted in several strains of "super bacteria," one of which caused a plague that wiped out a quarter of the world's population. Scientists have "evolved" from genetically modifying tomatoes to genetically modifying humans.
The book raises a few good questions: how far should science be allowed to go before its methodologies become unethical, particularly in relation to life? How far can we go to stop death without selling our souls to do so? (This is a common theme in both literature and pop culture, a theme addressed in two of my favorite sagas, Star Wars and Harry Potter.) And the final question, how far would or should a parent go to save a child's life? That final question is the one that most parents refuse to ask and pray that they never have to answer.
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