90 pages • 3 hours read
Mary E. PearsonThe Adoration of Jenna Fox
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Sections 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Section 16 Summary: The Beach—Leaving and Staying (pp. 232-250)
Lily, Mother, and Jenna go the beach. Lily asks Jenna what she needs, what she really needs. When Jenna has no answer, Lily declares that that’s always been Jenna’s problem. She’s never been able to advocate for her own wishes. She was always trying too hard to be perfect. Mother comes over and when Lily asks again, Jenna declares that she needs a red skirt, room, and not to be Mother’s “miracle” anymore. She needs to destroy her backup, along with Locke’s and Kara’s. Mother grants the request for the red skirt, but refuses to give Jenna the backups. Jenna realizes that Mother will never let her go. When they arrive home, Father is talking with the man Jenna once saw photographing her and Ethan at the mission. The man is Father’s security detail, and he tells Father that the backups need to be moved to a more secure location. Lily secretly agrees to help Jenna destroy the backups before they’re moved. Ethan and Jenna go to visit Allys, who has not been at school for several days. They meet Allys’ parents and discover that Allys is dying—infections have taken over her body once again, and thanks to the FSEB’s point system, she can only receive morphine for her pain, nothing else. Allys tells Jenna that she has informed her parents who Jenna is and has urged them to report her. Ethan starts to make plans to hide Jenna, but she can’t leave. She still has to rescue Kara and Locke.
Section 17 Summary: A Plan—Baptism (pp. 251-261)
At 4 AM, Jenna creates a distraction. She screams as though she is having a nightmare and when her parents rush to help and comfort her, she locks them in her room. Lily stands guard as Jenna unlocks the secret closet while her parents beg her to reconsider. She unbolts all three of the backups from the table and tells her parents to look out the window in her room. Jenna takes all three computers outside to the pond in the backyard and tosses them one by one into the water. She hesitates to destroy her own backup, but ultimately does so. Once again, Jenna Fox is the only Jenna Fox, a “mere girl like any other” (255). Lily lets Mother and Father out and they all gather in the kitchen. Though her parents are shocked and angered by what she’s done, Jenna asks that they respect her decision, despite the risks. They all hug. As Lily is putting on a pot of coffee, Allys’ parents appear on the doorstep. Jenna is afraid that they’ve come to expose her, but they throw themselves at Father, explaining that their daughter is near death. They know he saved Jenna, and they want him to save Allys as well. Father takes them into his study to talk. Later, Lily takes Jenna to church and blesses her with holy water in an informal baptism. Some things, Lily says, are “‘not meant to be known. Only believed’” (261). Jenna realizes she believes in her new world, and that while the world has changed, so has she.
Section 18 Summary: Two Hundred and Sixty Years Later (pp. 263-265)
It is over two hundred years later, and Jenna Fox is still alive. She sits in Mr. Bender’s garden. He and everyone else she knew have been dead for many decades—that is, except Allys. Father was able to save Allys along with twenty-two percent of her brain. Many others have been saved in the way Jenna and Allys were, but ten percent is the minimum percentage of brain activity needed—it’s known as the Jenna Standard. Though they are very old women, Jenna and Allys still appear to be teenagers and have spent years raising awareness for themselves and others like them. The Bio Gel neurochips learned, grew, mutated, and ultimately, survived beyond anyone’s expectations. After Allys and Jenna, Bio Gel was modified so that no one would live beyond an “appropriate” (264) age, but Allys and Jenna, the pioneers, have. Jenna spent “seventy good years” (264) with Ethan, but waited for many decades after his death to arrange to have a child with both their genetic material. Kayla, Jenna’s young daughter, comes home for school and joins her mother in the garden. Becoming a mother helped Jenna understand her parents’ choices, and she knows she will arrange to die when Kayla is older, as “no parent should outlive their child” (264). Jenna and Kayla feed the sparrows, just as Jenna and Mr. Bender did so many years ago.
Sections 16-18 Analysis
Early on in “The Beach,” Lily poses a question to Jenna that resonates throughout the rest of this final section: “‘What do you need?’” (232). This is a question that, in her past life, Jenna had been unable to answer. With Lily’s prodding, Jenna finally breaks free of the old Jenna, the “Jenna who wants to please” (232), and makes three demands. She asks first for a red skirt, a symbol of the choice and freedom she had in her previous life that were taken away from her after the accident. Second, she asks “not to be [Mother’s] miracle anymore” (233), representing the difference she wants to forge between her old life and the new. Finally, she asks for her backup, along with Kara’s and Locke’s. This request deals with her future, one she wants to create for herself without intervention or aid. When Mother denies the last two requests, Jenna realizes that Mother is incapable of letting Jenna go, despite what Jenna wants.
The idea of change permeates this final section of the book. While Jenna accepts the inevitability of change, Mother refuses to acknowledge it and Father fears it. “[Father] knows I am becoming more than he planned” (237), Jenna observes, “But all children grow up” (237). Hearing that the backups will soon be moved and knowing that her parents will never voluntarily accept who Jenna has become and what she wants, she and Lily make a plan to destroy the backups. While all of Jenna’s previous plans have been solitary efforts, she begins to learn to rely on others. She allows Lily to help her destroy the backups and lets Ethan go with her to talk to Allys. When deciding whether to stay or leave to escape the FSEB, Jenna lists off her reasons to stay, most of which are her relationships with people. “Staying for connection” (250), she says, “...And staying because maybe Lily does love the new Jenna as much as the old one, after all” (250). In this section, Jenna draws clear lines in the sand between her old self and her new one, acknowledging that old Jenna may not “have jeopardized her future for the sake of someone else” (251), but ultimately choosing sacrifice over her own survival.
Jenna’s destruction of the backups answers Lily’s question. What does Jenna need? “I need my own life” (254). She submerges the backups in water, a throwback to her first memories of nearly drowning and baptism. Water has the ability to kill or give new life, and when Jenna drops the backup into the water, she does both. She kills the possibility of “another” Jenna and ends her friends’ suffering, while emerging, clean and new, as Jenna Fox, “a mere girl like any other” (255). Her parents, though devastated, learn to accept how Jenna has changed. Two hundred years later, Jenna is a parent herself, and finally understands why her parents made the choices they did, because “no parent should outlive their child” (264). In all her many decades on Earth, Jenna’s biochips have mutated and evolved to ensure her survival, and Jenna herself has not stopped changing, growing, and learning. “People change” (263), she acknowledges, “And the world will change. Of that much I am certain” (263).
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By Mary E. Pearson
