The Adoration of Jenna Fox Study Guide

Mary E. Pearson was born in southern California on August 14, 1955. She received a BFA in Art from Long Beach State University and a teaching degree from San Diego State University. After teaching for many years, she became a published author and began writing full time. From 1999 to 2008 she published five picture books for young children with Children’s Press, an imprint of Scholastic. Her first chapter book, David v. God, was published in 2000. Her young-adult science fiction novel The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008) has won a number of awards, including a Golden Kite Honor Award; it was also named a 2009 ALA Best Book for Young Adults. It was followed by two sequels, The Fox Inheritance (2011) and Fox Forever (2013). After writing five more young-adult novels, Pearson published her first novel for adults, The Courting of Bristol Keats, in 2024. She lives with her husband in San Diego and has two daughters.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox takes place in a near future, where most infections are resistant to antibiotics. The first synthetic antibiotic (that is, the first human-designed antimicrobial drug that killed bacteria) was discovered by the Nobel Prize-winning German doctor Paul Erlich (1854–1915) in the early 20th century. This discovery enabled Erlich to cure syphilis, a bacterial STI. Perhaps the most famous natural antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928 but didn’t become widely commercially available until 1945. Since antibiotic use became widespread in the middle of the 20th century, antibiotic misuse has led to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: bacteria that have survived a course of antibiotics and pass their resistance to that antibiotic on to their “offspring.” Common misuses of antibiotics include healthcare uses—such as using antibiotics to treat non-bacterial illnesses such as viruses or bacterial illnesses that don’t merit antibiotic intervention. But there is also  agricultural misuse of antibiotics: for example, some livestock farmers give their cows or pigs low doses of antibiotics because antibiotics can encourage weight gain. Multi-drug-resistant bacteria (bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics) caused by antibiotic misuse already pose a major threat to human life, though at this point humanity does not yet face the scenario in The Adoration of Jenna Fox, where most infections are multi-drug resistant.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox is a young-adult science fiction novel that deals with questions of bioethics, genetic engineering, high-tech prostheses, and the definition of humanity. Earlier science-fiction novels that use androids, cyborgs, or genetic modification to test readers’ definitions of humanity include Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about androids that are increasingly difficult to tell apart from human beings; Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series (1987–1989), about humans genetically modified to mate with extraterrestrials; Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain (1993), about people who are genetically engineered not to need sleep; and Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002), about a future in which disembodied minds can be uploaded into various bodies. Any of these books might have helped to inspire The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In addition, The Adoration of Jenna Fox repeatedly quotes from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a book about living with nature and about social experimentation; it may be using Walden’s nature writing as a counterpoint for its own writing about genetic engineering of plants, animals, and humans. Finally, The Adoration of Jenna Fox represents a teenager oppressed by her parents’ expectations and desires; the first book that Mary E. Pearson wrote after finishing the Fox series, The Kiss of Deception (2014), deals with similar themes in a fantasy context: it’s about a princess who flees her royal role after her parents arrange an unwanted marriage for her.