The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Jenna Fox Chronicles, #1)

by Mary E Pearson

[clementine]

I only finished this book yesterday, but already I'm feeling that it's forgettable. Maybe I've just read things too similar to it before. I think that's part of it, but most of it is that I felt like this could have gone in a much creepier and more intense direction. I have read so much frickin' dystopian, and quite a few thrillers, and even quite a few medical thrillers, that I am now quite desensitized to a lot of it. Maybe if I'd read this book when I was twelve or thirteen it would have been a lot more shocking, but reading it at age eighteen was disappointing.

It was better than I'd been expecting, though; the writing was solid, much more so than I thought it would be. The plot was decent - predictable in certain places, but equally surprising in others. The romance, surprisingly, didn't irritate me the way these things tend to do, as it didn't seem to be the focus, and Jenna wasn't an annoying YA heroine who depends on her generic boyfriend with anger issues (of course; it's the way they always are) to survive. It wasn't melodramatic, but then, the lack of drama is one of my issues with the book.

So, well, hmm. That's how I sum this book up: hmm. For such an intriguing, compelling premise, it was surprisingly slow and boring. It could have been SO MUCH more engaging, and it definitely fell short for me. I mean, not much really happened. Jenna was never directly threatened; the stakes were pretty low; there wasn't a lot of suspense. The entire book was just a buildup to Jenna finding out she was living in an artificial body. This is interesting, but something much more exciting needs to come of it, I think.

Still deciding if I should read the next in the series are not; I feel like there may be room for Pearson to explore and expand upon her excellent premise in a sequel, but on the other hand things seemed to be wrapped up neatly (too neatly, probably) in the epilogue, which makes me think this was meant as a standalone book but was then turned into a series so Pearson and her publisher could milk it until it went dry. We'll see how many other books I want to read, I suppose; I'll get around to it if I have a chance.