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Pages 3–91
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Relationships
Biotechnology and Ethics
Humanity
Perfection and Purity
Idolatry and Religion
Summary
Analysis
A Hundred Points. Ethan picks up Allys from her community service at a nearby hospital on the Del Oro Ethics Task Force on his and Jenna’s way back to school. Jenna has learned that Allys believes “an out-of-control medical system” led to her infection and amputations, so Allys is devoted to preventing new medical abuses. Jenna also gets the sense that Ethan really feels for Allys’s plight—and she wonders why Ethan ended up at the village charter. When Jenna asks Allys whether the hospital runs the ethics task force, Allys says of course not and asks whether Jenna remembers the FSEB. When Jenna says no, Allys explains that FSEB stands for Federal Science Ethics Board, an organization that regulates “research and a lot of medical procedures”—as well as Bio Gel.
Allys may be partially correct that “an out-of-control medical system” led to her amputations, insofar as overuse of antibiotics in a medical context may have contributed to the antibiotic resistance of the bacteria that infected her. Yet when she first explained her amputations to Jenna, she also noted that her Restricted Antibiotic Waiver took too long to come through, indicating that overregulation of medical treatment may also have contributed to her suffering. As such, the novel casts doubt on Allys’s belief that the current regulatory system is the best response to the antibiotic abuses of the past. All readers know about Bio Gel at this point is that it preserves organs and so helps patients who need transplants—so the FSEB’s regulation of its use may seem, on the face of it, problematic or an overreaction.
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Jenna, remembering that her father’s company invented Bio Gel, asks about it. Allys explains that Bio Gel uses “neurochips” that can replace or collaborate with human cells. When Jenna asks why that would be bad, Allys says the badness depends on how the Bio Gel is used. Then she explains that the FSEB enforces a point system to limit the amount of Bio Gel used per patient: each person has a lifetime limit of one hundred points. Limbs aren’t worth that much, but organs are worth a lot.
This passage reveals that Bio Gel can not only preserve transplant organs but also replace parts of damaged organs. Given that these interventions seem overwhelmingly positive, the FSEB’s strict regulation of how many “points” of Bio Gel one person can use seems like an intervention based on fear (of creating cyborgs) and investment in human physical “purity”—a problematic ideology if it prevents people with damaged organs from receiving life-saving treatment.
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Ethan asks about brains, and Allys says that Bio Gel is only legally allowed to replace damaged brains “up to forty-nine percent.” When Jenna asks why that number, Allys says that the FSEB has to set the standard somewhere—to ensure that humans are humans and not “lab pets.” When Ethan questions why the FSEB gets to be the ultimate judge, Allys insists that the FSEB is idealistic and has “intelligent and qualified” staff. Parking at the school, Ethan says that “intelligent and qualified” people ruined his life two years ago. Then he hustles out of the car into the school. Allys, annoyed, comments on his short temper to Jenna. Jenna, meanwhile, wonders how Ethan’s life changed.
Allys’s explanation that Bio Gel can only replace damaged brains “up to forty-nine percent” so that humans aren’t “lab pets” makes clear that an arbitrary standard of physical “purity” is preventing people who need, say, 51% of their brain supplemented from receiving life-saving treatment. Ethan’s criticism of the idea that “intelligent and qualified” decision-makers will necessarily lead to good decisions furthers the novel’s implicit criticism of the FSEB—while suggesting at some dark backstory for Ethan.
Themes
After school, Jenna is waiting outside for Ethan to give her a ride when Dane approaches. He asks her a series of small-talk questions. When she gives clipped answers, he grabs her hand and asks whether Ethan’s been criticizing him. Then he claims that his real problem is just that he’s “honest”—like when he pointed out Jenna’s strange gait—but that he doesn’t mean to be cruel. Then he says that Ethan’s problem is an inability to handle the truth, which he bets Jenna will figure out soon, because she’s intelligent. Then he smiles winningly—but Jenna sees “emptiness” in his expression now. Dane asks whether he and Jenna can be friends, and Jenna, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, agrees. Dane says he’ll come by her house sometime and thanks her for the “invite.”
Though Jenna tries to give Dane the benefit of the doubt, he pushes her boundaries in disturbing ways, grabbing her hand without permission and claiming that she gave him a specific “invite” to her house when she only agreed to be his friend in vague terms. This behavior, together with the “emptiness” in his expression, hints that Dane is indeed “missing something” just like the other students warned Jenna. As such, the novel seems to be setting up a contrast between well-meaning, self-doubting Jenna and confident but immoral Dane.
Themes
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Contents. Jenna looks up “empty,” whose definitions include “having none of the usual or appropriate contents.” She thinks that she was right when she saw emptiness in Dane’s face and wonders how he would define the word “friends.”
Jenna’s sense that Dane has “none of the usual or appropriate contents” emphasizes that he is “missing something” important in terms of the way he treats other people. Given how important Jenna thinks friendship is to human identity, this emphasis is strengthened when she questions how Dane would define “friends”—suggesting that she would find his definition unsatisfactory.
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Home. On Saturday, Jenna lies in bed, contemplating the slow return of her memories. She now remembers banal things like sock-shopping, as well as emotive memories like crying for Claire as a toddler. After looking out the window for Lily—Lily’s in the greenhouse, while Claire has gone on an errand—Jenna goes to poke around in the downstairs rooms. She peeks into Claire’s messy office. In Lily’s bedroom, she sees a framed photo of Lily with a young Jenna and pushes it face-down, thinking that if Lily notices it doesn’t matter, because Lily already hates her.
Even though Jenna’s memories are returning, her relationship with Lily remains combative. This dynamic hints that Jenna’s possession of pre-accident Jenna’s memories isn’t enough to convince Lily that pre- and post-accident Jenna are the same person.
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In Claire’s room, in the back of the largest closet, Jenna finds a locked door from which comes a humming noise. Remembering something, Jenna searches under Claire’s mattress and finds a key. Then Lily surprises her, asking what she’s doing. Hiding the key in her pocket, Jenna claims she was just tidying Claire’s room because she had nothing else to do. Lily tells her there’s someone outside for her.
Presumably what Jenna remembers is that her mother tends to hide important objects under her mattress. This memory shows greater continuity in memory between pre- and post-accident Jenna while emphasizing that Jenna’s post-accident relationships are still marked by problems and distrust. After all, she is sneaking around her mother’s room for secrets before Lily nearly catches her.
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Outside, Jenna finds Ethan. He says he found some keys in his truck and asks whether they belong to Jenna. She says no. When he smiles awkwardly and says he’ll see Jenna in school, then, Jenna tells him his smile is “so fake” and offers to give him a tour. They end up sitting down by the pond in the backyard. When Jenna mentions that her grandmother (Lily) thinks it’s odd to hear frogs even in the winter, Ethan says it’s not strange in California. Jenna asks whether Ethan is “from here,” and he says yes in a loaded way. When she asks about it, Ethan explains that he spent a year in juvenile detention for beating someone up really badly, and now he goes to the village charter because it’s easier to avoid all the people who know him there.
Like Mr. Bender and Jenna herself, Ethan has experienced a traumatic incident—in his case, violently attacking someone—that has cut him off from many of his previous relationships. By drawing a parallel between Ethan and sympathetic protagonist Jenna, the novel hints that Ethan may have a sympathetic reason for engaging in an alarming and criminal act of violence.
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When Jenna says Ethan doesn’t seem like the type, Ethan replies, “You just never know.” Then he asks whether Jenna is going to grill him about what happened. Instead, she kisses him. He kisses her back. While they kiss, Jenna forgets about her own abnormality and focuses entirely on him and the present moment. When Lily starts yelling for Jenna to return to the house, Jenna pulls back and tells Ethan that she already knows what happened: “sometimes there is just no choice.”
Ethan says, “you never know” in response to Jenna’s claim that he’s not the type to engage in violence, a response that suggests people do extreme things, counter to their usual self-perceptions or identities, when they feel that they have—in Jenna’s words— “no choice.” If, as the novel has increasingly suggested, Jenna’s parents engaged in some extreme intervention to save her life after her accident, this scene may indirectly help explain why.
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Choice. Jenna, remembering a time when she couldn’t speak, thinks that it was “hell” to have everyone else making choices for her.
Though at this point Jenna remembers only pieces of her post-accident trauma, she seems to have found it “hell” not to be able to weigh in on what should—or should not—be done to save her. This is another detail hinting that Jenna’s parents went to extreme and perhaps controversial lengths to ensure her rehabilitation.
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Message. While Jenna slams kitchen drawers in anger, Lily tells her that she gets the point, and that Jenna should drink her nutrients. Jenna grabs her nutrients—and she pours mustard over the top before chugging it. When Lily warns Jenna that the mustard could make her sick, Jenna asks why Lily can’t mind her own business. Lily replies, “It’s not right.” Jenna points out that Ethan liked their kiss, and Lily replies, “For now, maybe.” Jenna, devastated, just echoes the word “now.” Lily says that separation is preferable for Ethan and Jenna both. Then she leaves. Jenna wonders whether she’ll even notice the photo Jenna pushed down.
At this point, Jenna doesn’t know why Lily thinks that her relationship with Ethan is “not right.” Yet readers can infer that it has to do with whatever Jenna’s parents did to save Jenna, which is presumably the same reason Lily doubts that post-accident Jenna is really her granddaughter. Thus, Lily’s disapproval of Jenna’s relationship with Ethan seems to be just her doubt about Jenna’s identity in another form. When Jenna wonders whether Lily will notice that Jenna pushed over the photo of them together, she seems implicitly to be wondering whether Lily will notice and care that Jenna is rejecting their relationship just as she feels Lily has rejected her.
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Mustard and Kisses. Jenna feels internally strange, but she isn’t sure whether it’s the mustard or the memory of kissing Ethan. She puts her head down on her desk, hoping to doze off, but can’t sleep.
Jenna’s inability to tell whether her strange internal sensations have to do with eating regular food or her new relationship with Ethan draws a parallel between whatever dramatic physical changes Jenna has undergone due to her accident and the change or growth in identity that a new romantic relationship can spur.
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Jenna Fox/Year Sixteen. Later, Jenna presses play on her last year of pre-accident home videos. She thinks that what she’s seen in the videos, more than anything else, is her pre-accident self’s “desperation to stay on the pedestal” where her parents placed her. Pre-accident Jenna was trapped by perfectionism.
This scene makes explicit what earlier scenes have hinted: Jenna feels that by idolizing her—placing her “on [a] pedestal”—her parents objectified her and failed to see her as a regular girl like anyone else.
Themes
In the first part of the video, Jenna is having a destination sixteenth-birthday party in Scotland. Jenna looks for Kara and Locke in the video but can’t find them. In the video’s next part, Jenna is dressed for ballet but insists to Claire that this is her “last performance.” When Claire protests that Jenna adores ballet, Jenna points out that she’s too tall to be a serious ballet dancer. When Claire claims that some companies take tall dancers, Jenna interrupts, saying that Claire can go become a ballerina herself if she wants. Claire is visibly hurt. The video ends. In the present, Jenna wonders why Lily told her to watch this year first—and whether Lily avoids Jenna because of how much Jenna has hurt Claire.
Claire’s investment in Jenna becoming a ballerina, despite Jenna’s own evident lack of interest, illustrates how Jenna’s parents pressured her to be a “perfect” daughter—that is, exactly the daughter they wanted and imagined—and thus let her down despite showering her with adoration and material gifts (like an international-destination Sweet Sixteen party). Meanwhile, when Jenna wonders whether Lily is hostile toward her because she’s hurt Claire—even though that pretty clearly isn’t Lily’s problem—it shows that post-accident Jenna feels guilty for hurting her mother’s feelings, even as she recognizes how her mother hurt pre-accident Jenna too.
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Deep. When Claire walks through the door carrying “fabric swatches and catalogs,” Jenna asks whether she needs help and calls her “Mom.” Claire, visibly overjoyed, says she doesn’t need help. Jenna, feeling the key she stole in her pocket, asks whether she can go for a walk in that case. When Claire agrees, Jenna waits until Claire has left the room, loudly opens and closes the front door, and then sneaks back into Claire’s room to open the locked door at the back of the closet. Inside, she finds three unusually large computers on a table. The middle computer is labeled “Jenna Angeline Fox.” Suddenly learning her middle name makes Jenna feel more “whole.”
It is unclear whether Jenna calling Claire “Mom” in this moment is an expression of guilt after watching their fight on video or an attempt to manipulate Claire into not suspecting that Jenna plans to search her room. Jenna feeling more “whole” after learning her middle name indicates that Jenna is still thinking of reclaiming her identity partly as a matter of learning more information about herself, even though the novel has at various points suggested that a person’s identity is more based on their interpersonal relationships than on what exactly they know about themselves.
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Suspecting that the computer contains more of her own life history, Jenna feels possessive toward it and tries to take it back to her own room—but it’s riveted to the table. Jenna cuts her hand on a metal bracket trying to bash the computer loose. Quickly closing her hand around the wound, which she fears is deep, Jenna decides to leave the computer for now. She relocks the closet room and flees to the upstairs bathroom to examine the wound—but what she sees shocks her.
Jenna’s feeling that she owns her life history and her assumption that her parents might hide it from her in a closet underscore both her growing sense of self and the ongoing tenuousness of her relationship with her parents. Meanwhile, her shock when she examines her wound may foreshadow that there is something wrong with her hand that the wound reveals.
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Blue. A disoriented Jenna struggles downstairs, pressing her barely-bleeding hand to her stomach. When she finds Claire and Lily in the kitchen, she demands to know what happened to her hand: the gash has revealed not blood and flesh but blue gel (Bio Gel) over shiny “synthetic bone and ligaments.” Lily encourages Jenna to sit down, while Claire admits that Jenna was so badly burned in the accident that both her hands had to be replaced.
Other than a sensation of “strangeness” in her hands, Jenna has had no hint that they were prostheses. Her very ignorance shows the quality of the protheses and the benefits of Bio Gel for rebuilding lost limbs. Yet Claire’s failure to tell Jenna that she lost limbs in her accident may foreshadow that there are additional secrets about the accident Claire has kept from her.
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Jenna, feeling “foreign” to herself, demands to know what else of her is synthetic. When Claire, crying, claims that what’s important is that Jenna’s still her daughter, Jenna remembers her strange gait and insists that Claire stand up. Jenna and Claire are the same height now. Jenna, remembering the video where pre-accident Jenna mentioned her height, is horrified. She demands to know how much of her body is original Jenna. When Claire, still crying, doesn’t speak, Lily cuts in that they were only able to preserve 10% of Jenna’s brain: “they should have let you die.” Claire insists that they saved “the most important” 10%.
Upon learning that parts of her body are prostheses, Jenna feels “foreign” to herself, doubting her own identity—even though, presumably, she doesn’t think her classmate Allys is any less herself for having prosthetic arms and legs. When Claire asserts that the important thing is that Jenna is her daughter, she’s implicitly arguing that relationships matter more than bodies in determining a person’s identity. Yet she undermines her own point when she also claims that they saved “the most important” 10% of Jenna’s body—as if that particular 10% can ensure the continuity of Jenna’s identity pre- and post-accident. Lily, at least, is clearly unconvinced: when she bluntly tells Jenna that “they should have let you die,” she is heavily implying that Jenna’s parents created a new entity from biotechnology and scraps of their daughter rather than “saving” pre-accident Jenna wholesale. Lily’s willingness to say goodbye to her granddaughter, in contrast with Claire’s desperate refusal to let go of her daughter, may suggest that Lily’s religious worldview and presumable belief in an afterlife make it easier for her to let go of the dying.
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Pinned. While Jenna lies unresponsive in bed, Claire calls Jenna’s father to come explain everything to her in person. Meanwhile, Claire tries to explain it herself: after the accident, Jenna was temporarily stable, but her body became infected, and she began to die. Jenna’s father pulled Claire into a closet and explained the one way they could save her. Immediately they moved Jenna to a private medical facility, Jenna’s father injecting Jenna with “nanobots” on the drive to scan her brain before it was too late. Once Jenna got to the private facility, they used Bio Gel to save “the butterfly […] the heart of the brain.” Jenna, thinking that her memories aren’t in the butterfly, wonders how she remembers the things she does. She goes silent and Claire leaves.
The novel presents Jenna’s parents’ decision to save “the heart of the brain” and rebuild Jenna from a brain scan and biotechnology as a spur of the moment act of desperation agreed upon in a closet—not a considered decision. As such, it leaves open the possibility that their decision was reckless and even irresponsible from a bioethical perspective, even as their intense love for Jenna renders their behavior understandable and even sympathetic.
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White. Jenna remembers a moment, after the accident, when Lily and another person “sprinkl[ed]” her with holy water and told her she could “let go” if necessary. The incident gave her hope, but she wasn’t allowed to let go—instead, she was pulled “someplace deep [she] didn’t understand,” where she was isolated.
This memory suggests that Jenna wanted to “let go” and die, something her religious grandmother wanted to allow her to do. But instead, her parents’ intervention brought her “someplace deep” that she has described previously as a “hell” or a void. The contrast between religious Lily allowing Jenna to die and Jenna’s desperate parents forcing her to stay suggests that, in the book’s view, religious belief systems can help people like Lily grieve healthily—whereas people who project quasi-religious emotions onto other people, as in Jenna’s parents’ borderline worship of her, may behave in unhealthy ways as a result.
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Father. At 3 a.m. Jenna’s father appears in her bedroom door and apologizes that Jenna found out this way. Jenna calls her artificial limbs “impostors.” When her father says they used her ballet recital videos to create near-perfect replicas, Jenna responds dismissively. Then she asks whether her skin is real. Her father insists it is real: it was grown in a lab and “genetically engineered” for compatibility with Bio Gel. Jenna asserts that that isn’t human skin, but her father disagrees: a genetically engineered tomato is still a tomato. When Jenna points out that she isn’t a tomato, her father says no, she’s his daughter—and they should cut to the chase, because she probably doesn’t just want to know about skin.
When Jenna calls her prosthetic limbs “impostors,” she is implicitly calling herself an “impostor”: she doubts that she is the real Jenna Fox because of how much of her original body was destroyed in the accident. Moreover, Jenna now seems to doubt that she is even human: she simply dismisses her father’s point that genetically engineering human tissue is still human by treating his analogy with a GMO tomato as ridiculous. Her father responds by asserting her identity as his daughter, another instance of characters implicitly claiming that people’s identities derive from their relationships with others and not total physical continuity with their original bodies.
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Jenna asks “what” she is with only 10% of Jenna Fox’s original brain. Her father replies that she’s Jenna Angeline Fox, saved by cutting-edge medicine the way many people are. He explains that they saved part of her brain, supplemented it with Bio Gel, and used the brain scan they took of Jenna to re-upload “every bit of information that was ever in [her] brain” to post-accident Jenna. Basically, they saved her mind by uploading it entirely to a safe environment until they could download it back into her brain and body. Jenna realizes that that safe environment was her “hell,” the “black void” she remembers. Jenna, horrified, shivers. Her father hugs her and promises her everything will be fine. As he leaves the room, she asks whether “a most important ten percent” to the brain actually exists. He says yes.
When Jenna asks “what” rather than “who” she is, she reveals again that she doubts not only her identity but her very humanity. Meanwhile, her realization that the “hell” and “black void” she remembers from her coma was, in reality, her experience as a disembodied mind in a computer emphasizes how science-fictional, experimental, and alien the experience Jenna’s parents forced her to undergo was—all because they loved her and wanted to avoid grieving her. Finally, like Claire, Jenna’s father offers inconsistent justifications for why post-accident Jenna is Jenna Angeline Fox: he’s claimed it’s due to their relationship, but he also claims it’s because she possesses the “most important ten percent” of her original body’s brain, an extremely subjective claim.
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Day One/New Jenna. As Jenna’s father staples the wound in her hand, with Claire sitting nearby, he asks how Jenna got hurt. She claims she fell and gashed it on a rock. Then she asks what the other 90% of her brain is, if she only has 10% of the original. Her father claims that it’s all her original brain, just composed of new material—Bio Gel, an “artificial neural network” made of “neural chips.” Jenna asks why she doesn’t have all her memories if they uploaded her whole brain—though she holds back from asking why she can remember things she shouldn’t, like her baptism. Her father says that after the accident, her brain and the Bio Gel need to construct “new pathways to access and store information.”
Here, Jenna’s father makes a claim that the book doesn’t—and can’t—confirm or deny: he claims that Jenna’s brain counts as “original,” even though it is mostly composed of new material, because it replicates the structure (or “network”) and contents of Jenna’s pre-accident brain. This is, of course, very arguable, and that fact reveals the difficulty of determining the truth when talking about bioethical issues—as well as the difficulty of determining whether post-accident Jenna is the “same” as pre-accident Jenna.
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Jenna asks whether they’re hiding out in California because her medical procedures were illegal. Her father admits that that’s one reason; the other is that Bio Gel’s “shelf life” is dramatically shortened by temperature changes or cold. Jenna, shocked and disgusted to learn she has a “shelf life,” asks how long it is. Her father says 200 years in California but just a few years in Boston. Jenna calls herself “an uploaded artificial freak.” Claire stands and almost slaps Jenna, but she restrains herself. She tells Jenna not to judge them—she can’t understand. Then she leaves the room. When Jenna’s father says the situation is very difficult for Claire, Jenna says it’s difficult for her—she’s not sure she’s human. When her father insists she is, Jenna says she doesn’t know whether they preserved her soul and storms away.
The revelation that Bio Gel has a short “shelf life” in cold weather, despite everything else that it can do, illustrates that science is not all-powerful even in the technologically advanced near future of the novel. That Jenna has a “shelf life” also underscores the unusualness of her cyborg body, causing her to doubt her humanity and think of herself as a “freak.” When Jenna questions whether she has a soul, meanwhile, it suggests that biotechnological advances don’t necessarily void people’s need for a spiritual or even religious understanding of themselves and the world.
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Lily. Jenna sits on a rock by the backyard pond. She throws her shoe into the lake, pulls her sock off, and examines her artificial foot. As she does, she wonders whether souls are real and if she still has hers. She contemplates how her father and Claire had outsized ambitions for her—and now their ambition is that she “be just who [she] was before,” as impossible a standard as their previous standards were.
Here Jenna continues to explore whether a spiritual or religious framework will help her understand her new cyborg state: what is a soul, was Jenna born with one, and if so, does she still have it? At the same time, Jenna struggles with her parents’ standards for her. Whereas before the accident they wanted her to be a perfect daughter, a ballerina, and an academic success, they now want her to “be just who [she] was before”—an impossible standard for any growing and changing teenager, let alone one whose identity has dramatically shifted in the wake of a traumatic accident.
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Suddenly, Lily comes and sits down beside Jenna on the rock. When Lily admits that she doesn’t know how to think about the new Jenna, Jenna criticizes Lily’s tactlessness and asks whether Lily thought her parents did the wrong thing in saving Jenna. Lily replies that unlike Claire and Jenna’s father, she “think[s] there are things worse than dying.” Jenna, recalling the dark void, asks whether Lily thinks Jenna died. Lily accuses Jenna of projecting and begins to say, “You were always good at putting—” before cutting herself off. She admits that post-accident Jenna is a lot like pre-accident Jenna, but she doesn’t know whether post-accident Jenna is just “a perfect replica” or a real “miracle.” Jenna admits she doesn’t know either.
When Lily says she “think[s] there are things worse than dying,” it suggests that her religious belief in an afterlife allowed her to put Jenna’s death in perspective in a way that Claire and Jenna’s father weren’t able to do. For example, Lily clearly thinks that building a non-Jenna cyborg to replace the original Jenna would be a worse outcome than simply allowing Jenna to die. Yet at the same time, Lily has instinctively come to believe that post-accident Jenna and pre-accident Jenna are the same person, even as her conscious mind questions it. Readers can see that instinctive belief when Lily says, “You were always good at putting—”, a phrase that suggests Lily thinks Jenna, pre- and post-accident, is good at putting words in Lily’s mouth.
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Species. Jenna looks up the definition of “human” and wonders how she can tell which definition is right.
This passage emphasizes that, having learned she’s effectively a cyborg, Jenna now doubts not only her identity but also her humanity. She wants to figure out whether the “right” definition of humanity would include her.
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Details. After dinner, Jenna, her father, and Claire sit in awkward quiet in the living room. Lily has made herself scarce. After Jenna’s father begins to explain in more detail the biotechnology behind Jenna’s recovery, Jenna cuts in to ask why they didn’t tell her what had happened as soon as she came out of the coma. Her father says that maybe they should have, but they didn’t know what to do. Claire says that when Jenna has her own children, she’ll understand. When Jenna snaps that she can’t have children, Claire explains that they saved one of Jenna’s ovaries and put it in an organ bank.
When Jenna asks her parents why they didn’t tell her everything after she emerged from her coma, the question underscores that despite Jenna’s parents’ love for her, they behave toward her in suspect ways, deceiving her and manipulating her.
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Jenna, disgusted that “bits” of her are so spread out, returns to her first subject: why didn’t her parents tell her? She claims that she won’t even address that they made her “acceptable ballerina height.” Claire snaps that they were going through hell just as much as Jenna was—but then she admits that they didn’t tell Jenna because they weren’t sure she could keep the secret, which would jeopardize everyone who worked to help her. Jenna’s father cuts in that Claire didn’t make Jenna shorter: they had to change Jenna’s height for reasons of “mechanics.” Jenna thinks there’s still something her parents aren’t telling her, but she isn’t sure what. Meanwhile, Claire begs her not to tell anyone about this. Jenna silently nods.
Jenna clearly assumes that her parents changed her height after the accident to make her a better ballerina, an alarming assumption that shows how objectified she feels by their perfectionistic standards for her and how little she trusts them. Though her father denies this assumption, Jenna still believes he’s lying about something, which reminds readers of the various ways Jenna’s parents—in the name of love—have deceived her since she regained consciousness.
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Hold On. Jenna remembers having a dream about her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, which melted into her father over her hospital bed, begging her to “hold on.”
Here the novel link a sentimental memory of Jenna’s father teaching her to ride a bike with his desperation that she “hold on” and survive her accident. This linkage emphasizes that despite his flaws, Jenna’s father really does love her and acted as he did because he wanted his daughter to survive.
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Denied. Jenna tries a more targeted Net search of herself. Her Netbook denies her access. She has a memory of keys sailing through the air and her fingers outstretched.
When Jenna’s Netbook denies her information about herself, readers may assume that Jenna’s parents programmed controls into the Netbook to keep further information from Jenna “for her own good.” This shows them continuing with their pattern of controlling behavior and deceitfulness.
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An Invisible Boundary. At school, Ethan leads a discussion on Walden and keeps pausing for Jenna to jump in, but she doesn’t. She’s not sure she should keep going to school—she’s not “normal”—but her parents told her to keep up her routine. Her father returned to Boston, too, to keep from drawing attention to himself. The third time Ethan starts a Walden quotation and waits for Jenna to finish it, she does—and then makes a snarky comment about him forcing her to participate. When he asks whether she has an opinion about the quotation, Jenna quotes another passage and stands to storm out—but wonders whether she’s moving oddly as she does so. Allys asks Dr. Rae whether they can take a break.
When Jenna doubted her identity but not her humanity, she was happy to forge a romantic relationship with Ethan, implicitly believing that their relationship would help her build a new identity in the aftermath of her accident. Now that she knows she’s not “normal” in the sense that she’s possibly non-human, however, she wants to self-isolate because she feels inferior to and fundamentally different from her classmates.
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Outside, Ethan confronts Jenna about ignoring him after kissing him. Jenna wonders how she can explain that she’s “a different person” since that happened. Then Dane interrupts them, telling Ethan to back off Jenna and “beat up someone else.” When Ethan storms off, Dane tells Jenna that Ethan put a guy in the hospital for a month. Then he leads Jenna back inside. Ethan doesn’t come back to class. Meanwhile, Dane keeps trying to flirt with Jenna—though she thinks that, to him, it’s just a game to “beat” Ethan.
When Jenna thinks that she’s a “different person” since she kissed Ethan, the thought suggests that her knowledge of her cyborg status has fundamentally changed her identity. Meanwhile, Dane’s cruel reference to Ethan’s violent past—go “beat up someone else”—and his desire to flirt with Jenna to “beat” Ethan shows his callousness in contrast with Jenna’s sensitivity.
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The Greenhouse. Jenna enters the greenhouse where Lily is working. Though surprised to see Jenna, Lily asks for her help potting palms. As they work, Jenna thinks about how she used to have a great relationship with Lily, who tried to shield her sometimes from her overbearing parents’ interferences. Abruptly, Lily tells Jenna that she shouldn’t remember the time she drowned before she was two years old—but she does. Jenna suggests that her parents don’t know what they’re doing. Lily agrees. Jenna demands to know what she should do, saying that Lily is “the only one” who’s truthful with her.
This passage reveals that while Jenna’s parents wanted Jenna to be perfect, Lily tried to protect pre-accident Jenna from their perfectionism and to help Jenna be herself. Lily’s pre-accident protection of Jenna causes Jenna to trust Lily even post-accident, feeling that her grandmother is “the only one” who’s honest with Jenna—in contrast with Jenna’s parents, who love Jenna but for that very reason deceive Jenna, supposedly for her own good.
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Lily hesitates to betray Claire’s secrets. Jenna is about to storm out when Lily says that, though she’d do “almost anything” for Claire, Jenna has “a right to know.” Lily tells Jenna a story about how, when Jenna was 16, she had an argument with Claire, and Claire told Jenna to go to her room—but Jenna didn’t. Jenna, overwhelmed, remembers how she felt forced to go to her room when Claire told her to recently, even when she didn’t want to. Lily says, “I’m not sorry I told you. It just isn’t right.”
At this point, the novel doesn’t reveal exactly how Jenna’s parents are forcing her to obey the command to go to her room. Yet context suggests it is related to Jenna’s biotechnological rebuilding post-accident. Characteristically, Lily is willing to stand on principle and say that Jenna’s parents’ protective, controlling behavior and desire to make Jenna perfect “isn’t right”—even though she is as devoted to her own daughter (Claire) as Claire is devoted to Jenna.
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Control. Jenna finds Claire in the kitchen with her Netbook and asks when her father is going to call. While Jenna waits for her father to call, she pulls a stack of plates from the cupboard. When he does call, she begins smashing the plates on the floor. As both her parents cry out, Jenna keeps smashing plates and asks whether Claire has anything to say to her. Eventually, after Jenna smashes the fourth plate, Claire yells for Jenna to go to her room. It takes all Jenna’s willpower not to obey. She yells, “How dare you program me!”
When Jenna yells, “How dare you program me!”, it suggests that she believes her parents included “code” or something similar in her brain upload to make her obedient to them. Such a use of biotechnology would be a clear attack on Jenna’s autonomy and an abuse of scientific power.
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Jenna’s father asks her to come sit near the Netbook so he can explain. When she asks whether “sit down” is another programmed command, he points out that she isn’t in her room—she’s not “programmed.” Rather, they planted a “subliminal message” in case Jenna got out of control—because, with her new physiology, they couldn’t use medication to deal with injury side effects like “erratic behavior.” Moreover, they wanted a command to get Jenna out of sight fast in case someone came nosing around the house. What happened to Jenna isn’t legal under the FSEB; if the authorities found out about her, everyone who helped her might go to prison, and it’s not clear what would happen to Jenna herself.
Jenna’s father claims that they planted a “subliminal message” in Jenna’s brain but didn’t “program[]” her. The difference, in his eyes, seems to be that Jenna can override the “subliminal message” with sufficient willpower, whereas she wouldn’t be able to override programming. Despite his definitions and rationalizations, however, his and Claire’s decision to plant a subliminal message in their daughter’s mind as a guard against her possible “erratic behavior” rather than explaining the stakes of her situation to her shows yet again their controlling, objectifying tendencies when it comes to Jenna despite their love of her.
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Jenna’s father goes on to explain that no one knows where Jenna is—they only told everyone that she was “stabilized,” and the California house technically belongs to Lily. Jenna asks how they created the subliminal message. Claire bluntly admits that they uploaded it. When Jenna asks whether they uploaded anything else, they pause—and then admit that they uploaded all the information from an entire sophomore-to-senior high-school curriculum to make up for the school Jenna missed because of the accident. Jenna, thinking of all her historical and literary knowledge, concludes: “None of it is really mine.”
Jenna’s belief that “none of” her historical and literary knowledge “is really [hers]” suggests that to make knowledge part of your identity, you have to work to acquire it—knowledge that was downloaded into a person with no effort on their part in some sense doesn’t count. Yet at the same time, this scene poses an implicit question about biotechnology: if you could download huge amounts of useful information into your brain, wouldn’t you want to do it?
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Jenna says that she wants the key to the back of the closet. When her parents go still and look “terrified,” she clarifies: the key to the door at the back of her own closet, so she can hide there if necessary. Immediately her father agrees, and Claire rushes to produce two keys that might fit that door. Jenna says she’ll go try both keys, runs upstairs to her room, and checks to make sure she still has Claire’s closet key in the pants she was wearing a few days ago. When she finds Claire’s closet key, she hides it under her carpet.
Jenna mentions the key at the back of the closet—without specifying at first whether she means Claire’s closet or her own—to test her parents. They fail the test with their “terrified” reaction: clearly, they are hiding something else from Jenna in the peculiar computer closet Jenna found in Claire’s room. Through their deceitfulness and distrust of Jenna, they cause Jenna to act deceitfully in turn.
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Trust. At midnight, Jenna rewatches a home video from when she was seven years old. In the video, Jenna leads her father, blindfolded, through the house. Current Jenna thinks that her father used to trust her and wonders when that stopped. In the video, young Jenna leads her father to the kitchen, where a huge, wonky birthday cake she made for him is waiting. The video makes Jenna feel like she was “enough.”
At age seven, Jenna felt trusted by her parents, who made her feel like she was “enough.” By her pre-accident teenage years, she felt that she wasn’t “enough”—her parents wanted her to be perfect, which she wasn’t—and that her parents didn’t trust her. Jenna’s rewatching of this happy video shows her longing for her parents’ trust and acceptance.
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Sanctuary. Jenna goes to the mission church, which is empty, and thinks about what church means: it’s “a place of forgiveness.” Though she knows she shouldn’t, she climbs over the altar rail and puts her hands on the altar, wondering whether “what I am is enough.” From behind her, Ethan calls that she shouldn’t be there—but then he joins her behind the altar railing. He tells her that she was supposed to meet him for community service an hour ago. They awkwardly discuss whether Jenna would rather work with someone else, but then, Ethan kisses her.
Again, in this scene, Jenna toys with a spiritual or religious understanding of her predicament, thinking that she can go to church for “forgiveness” and searching for an answer to whether she’s “enough”—that is, human and lovable even if not perfect—at the altar. Yet unlike Lily, who seems to find answers in religion, it isn’t clear that Jenna does.
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Jenna pushes Ethan away and tells him their kissing isn’t “right.” When Ethan brings up his past, Jenna says it’s not about that—it’s about her. He asks her to tell him. She says they should go outside.
Jenna has clearly internalized Lily’s earlier fears that Jenna’s relationship with Ethan isn’t “right” because Jenna may not be human. Yet Jenna, sensitive to moral concerns, also honors her relationship with Ethan by deciding to tell him the truth—a stark contrast to her mutually deceitful relationship with her parents.
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Telling. In the cemetery, Jenna gives Ethan her hands and tells him they’re prostheses. He replies that they’re “beautiful.” She explains that it’s not just her hands: “nearly everything” in her is prosthetic and she’s a “freakish monster” who’s extremely illegal. Ethan replied that people called him a “monster” after he violently beat up the drug dealer who gave his 13-year-old brother HCP, even though his brother’s now a drug addict “in and out of rehab.” Ethan insists that he and Jenna aren’t monsters. He and Jenna hug, and he warns her not to tell Allys about her prostheses.
Ethan parallels Jenna’s accident and subsequent cyborg status with his own decision to beat up the drug dealer who got his young brother addicted to drugs. Though the two events don’t seem that similar on their face, both were traumatic one-off events that changed the course of Jenna and Ethan’s lives. Thus, by making the comparison, Ethan seems to be arguing that a single traumatic event in a person’s past doesn’t necessarily define their identity—and by itself doesn’t make them in human or render them “monsters.” Meanwhile, when Ethan warns Jenna not to tell Allys about the prostheses, he is implying that Allys will judge Jenna’s cyborg body to be an unethical abuse of biotechnology that ought to be reported to the authorities.
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Would They Ask That of Someone Who Was Real? Jenna thinks of her “eternity” trapped in the dark void as a disembodied mind and wonders how people can expect her not to talk about it.
The title of this section, “Would They Ask That of Someone Who Was Real?”, indicates that Jenna feels dehumanized by her parents. Specifically, she feels dehumanized both by the suffering they accidentally inflicted on her when she was a disembodied mind and by their command that she not talk about her suffering with anyone. Their treatment of her causes her to further doubt her own reality, that is, her status as a real human being.
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A Science Lesson. Jenna’s class is hiking to a creek. When Jenna sees Dane drop his smile as soon as Dr. Rae isn’t looking, Jenna thinks he’s probably a sociopath. Meanwhile, Jenna notices that Allys is walking without braces. Allys explains that the latest software for her prostheses is working well. When Jenna asks more about Allys’s work for the ethics board, Allys explains that she wants to make sure no one ever suffers like she has due to out-of-control science, but she’s still grateful for her prostheses: “They aren’t perfect, but none of us are ever exactly what we want to be, right?” Very seriously, Jenna stops Allys and tells Allys she likes her—feeling awkward but wanting to get it out.
Jenna’s speculation that Dane is a sociopath sets up an implicit contrast between the two characters. Whereas Jenna worries that she is “less than human” because of her cyborg body, she suspects that biologically human Dane is somehow “less than human” morally speaking—that he lacks normal human moral and emotional responses. Meanwhile, Allys’s claim that “none of us are ever exactly what we want to be” shows a comfort with human imperfection that many characters, especially Jenna’s parents, have failed to show. That Jenna announces her liking of Allys at this moment suggests she appreciates Allys’s embrace of imperfection. Yet at the same time, Allys’s intense focus on bioethics and the regulation of biotechnology may foreshadow that she’ll reject Jenna’s friendship once she knows the truth about Jenna’s cyborg body.
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When the class reaches the creek, Allys lectures them about pre-FSEB bioengineering of plants and animals. Jenna jumps in, asking whether the problem is the crossbreeding between non-engineered and engineered species, “taint[ing] the original species.” Allys largely agrees but questions the word “taint,” arguing it’s more about protecting the original species’ survival. Then Ethan jumps into the conversation, pointing out that the FSEB has had its share of scandals. Allys, annoyed, argues that those scandals are in the past—and that without the FSEB, terrible things would happen. Jenna adds, “Illegal things […] Freakish things […] Dangerous things.” Allys stares at Jenna, and Jenna wonders what she sees.
When Jenna uses the word “taint” to describe crossbreeding between non-engineered and engineered species, she implies that FSEB-style regulation of bioengineering is partly about a problematic ideal of purity—a rejection of anything “freakish” or “impure.” Allys contests this implication, arguing that it’s more about protecting non-engineered species’ survival—but readers may suspect that Jenna has put her finger on a problematic argument against genetic engineering.
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Dane asks why the class is even there at the creek. Allys snaps that 40 years ago, this area was underwater, but thanks to the effects of out-of-control genetic engineering, the landscape has dramatically changed, mostly drying up the creek. Jenna stares at the puny creek and thinks about what biotechnology has done to her and to Allys.
Though Jenna may be right that people fear genetic engineering in part due to a problematic psychological investment in “purity,” the revelation here that genetic engineering has also had terrible environmental effects makes clear that Allys still has good reasons for supporting the regulation of biotechnology.
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Red. At home, Jenna examines the clothes in her closet, all of which are blue and boring. Suddenly, she remembers shopping with Kara on Newbury Street. Kara scolded Jenna, saying that all Jenna’s clothes were blue and that she should buy a skirt in a different color. Remembering that blue was her favorite color and red was Kara’s, Jenna speculates that Claire bought all Jenna’s new clothes and tried to get her favorite color—but Jenna also remembers the red skirt that Kara convinced her to buy and wishes she had it now.
Kara convinced Jenna to buy a red skirt despite Jenna’s usual habit of buying all-blue clothes, an incident that symbolizes how people’s friends encourage them to grow, change, and enlarge their identities. This memory, showing how Kara helped Jenna evolve, implies a contrast between Jenna’s friendships—which enlarge her identity—and her current relationship with Claire, in which Claire wants her to be exactly how she was pre-accident, which is symbolized by Claire buying Jenna all-blue clothes.
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Silver. Walking to Mr. Bender’s, Jenna thinks about how long she’ll live if she stays in California—and how short her life might be if she goes back to Boston, where Kara and Locke are. She wonders whether she’s the sort of creature that’s allowed to make choices and thinks maybe one day she’ll go to Boston. Thinking about the memories she’s regained and the ones she’s still missing, she wonders whether there is a “real Jenna”—or whether the old Jenna was always going to change into something else too.
When Jenna wonders whether she’s the sort of creature who’s allowed to make choices, it shows how her parents’ deceitful and controlling behavior and perfectionist standards have left Jenna feeling flawed and dehumanized. Yet when she questions whether there is a “real Jenna,” it shows her coming to understand that change is a natural part of being human—so that even if she’s different from the “old Jenna,” that doesn’t mean she’s an entirely different person or abnormal in some way.
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Jenna finds Mr. Bender is his back yard, looking at a broken window in his garage house. When she asks whether he broke it, he replies significantly that “someone did.” Jenna peers inside, seeing trashed furniture and an old, parked car that looks somehow familiar. When she asks whether Mr. Bender called the police, he says the risk to his identity isn’t worth it. He can easily replace what was destroyed—he’s just disturbed that someone chose to smash his things for the “sick pleasure” of it, without even stealing any valuables.
By “someone,” Mr. Bender presumably means Dane, as he lives the neighborhood and has a history of antisocial behavior. When Mr. Bender implies that Dane takes “sick pleasure” in destruction, it heightens that there is something morally wrong with Dane—that he is “inhuman” in a way that sensitive, friendly Jenna isn’t despite her fears about her own humanity.
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Jenna asks to use Mr. Bender’s Netbook, claiming hers is broken. He agrees. After a few searches, Jenna quickly realizes that her parents put search controls on her Netbook preventing her from accessing certain information. She learns that Kara and Locke both died in the car accident that almost killed her. When she asks Mr. Bender whether he knew about Kara and Locke, he nods. Jenna reads on that no one plans to prosecute her, but that she was believed to be the driver and that she didn’t have a license. Jenna, shutting Mr. Bender’s Netbook, thinks that she knew “deep inside” that Kara and Locke were dead—but she’s sure that it wasn’t her fault.
This passage confirms that Jenna’s parents put controls on her online searches to prevent her from learning that her friends were dead, showing yet again how they control and deceive Jenna in the name of protecting her out of love. Jenna immediately refuses to believe that she’s culpable for the accident that killed her friends. At this point, it’s unclear whether her refusal foreshadows that the newspaper account of the accident is false—or simply shows that Jenna has bought into her parents’ narrative that pre-accident Jenna was near-perfect and was thus incapable of making such a bad mistake.
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When Jenna announces to Mr. Bender that she would remember if she had killed her friends in a car crash, he suggests that maybe she “blocked it out.” Jenna wonders whether her father and Claire blocked it. Yet Jenna doesn’t feel guilty. She has vague memories of a night sky, keys in the air, and her own outstretched hand. Mr. Bender suggests that they take a walk in the garden, but the birds still won’t perch on Jenna’s hand, and she wonders whether “now [she knows] why.”
Jenna’s immediate suspicion that her parents “blocked” her memory of the accident shows how their controlling behavior and perfectionistic standards have led her to mistrust them, while her speculation that the birds won’t perch on her hands because she caused her friends’ deaths shows her paranoid self-judgment. At the same time, however, she still doubts the newspaper account of the accident and has a vague memory of car keys flying through the air—foreshadowing further revelations about the accident later in the novel.
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One Simple Thing. Back home, Jenna hunts furiously through the garage for the red skirt, but she can’t find it.
Earlier, the red skirt represented how Jenna’s friend Kara helped Jenna grow and evolve. As such, Jenna’s inability to find the red skirt in the present may symbolize how Jenna’s spotty memory of her friends is preventing her from fully accessing the lessons she learned from them, causing her to regress.
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Another Dark Place. Claire is in Jenna’s bedroom measuring her windows for drapes. Abruptly, Jenna says the word “accident.” Then she asks whether her prior discomfort with mentioning the word was another subliminal message her parents uploaded to her. Claire says no—the reluctance was Jenna’s, and Claire didn’t want to put pressure on her. When Jenna states that Kara and Locke are dead, Claire holds out her arms, and Jenna goes to her for comfort. Rocking Jenna on the bed, Claire explains that they tried to tell Jenna at the hospital, but Jenna “went into distress just trying to communicate” about it and then slipped into a coma. Claire then insists that it was an accident.
When Jenna asks whether her parents conditioned her not to mention the word “accident,” it shows how their previous deceits and biotechnological manipulations of her have led her to deeply mistrust them. Claire’s explanation—that they initially tried to explain but that it caused Jenna enormous “distress”—illustrates how much of Jenna’s parents’ deceitful and controlling behavior is rooted in love and protectiveness.
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Jenna asks why her parents blocked mentions of the accident from her Netbook. Claire said that because Jenna didn’t remember the accident when she woke up, they didn’t want her “to come upon something unexpectedly and have a setback.” For a while, Claire and Jenna lie on the bed together, almost napping. Time passes. Jenna whispers, “I’m sorry”—for Kara and Locke, but for Claire too. Claire apologizes back. Jenna asks whether she can have red drapes instead of blue. Claire says she can have “anything.”
Again, that Jenna’s parents put controls on Jenna’s Netbook to prevent her from “hav[ing] a setback” emphasizes how their deceitful and controlling behavior is based in loving overprotectiveness. Meanwhile, Jenna’s desire to have red drapes—red being her friend Kara’s favorite color—shows that Jenna wants to reclaim her relationships with her old friends and the influence they had on her identity.
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Percentages. Jenna and Lily are cleaning out the garage after Jenna’s rampage to find the red skirt. Jenna apologizes for having broken Lily’s vase and asks why Lily’s things are boxed in the garage. Lily explains that her things were supposed to be in storage—after she learned that Jenna’s parents were doing to Jenna, she planned to leave the country. Jenna asks whether Lily witnessed the “construction,” and Lily says no—she and Claire basically weren’t speaking at the time due to Lily’s terror of “the unknown” involved.
Lily didn’t witness the “construction” of Jenna’s cyborg body because she was terrified of “the unknown” involved in saving Jenna’s life—that is, she didn’t know whether Jenna’s parents would succeed in saving the “real” Jenna or whether they would be effectively building a cyborg replacement daughter. By admitting that her negative reaction was partly based in fear, Lily suggests that some of her resistance to biotechnological advancements and investment in genetic purity is psychological rather than based on objective principles.
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Jenna agrees that her parents didn’t account for the unknown, like her ability to remember her early childhood. Yet she admits that she likes this ability, as if her ability to remember more of her life now will “balance out the percentages.” Lily scoffs that “percentages can’t define your identity” and then asks what other unknowns Jenna hasn’t shared with her parents. Jenna reveals that she’s been hearing Kara and Locke’s voices, though she read that they died in the accident. Then she insists to Lily that she didn’t kill her friends—though she wonders whether she just can’t accept that she did because “that would mark Jenna’s permanent fall from perfection.”
When Jenna talks about “balanc[ing] out the percentages,” she seems to mean that remembering more of pre-accident Jenna’s early life might “balance out” the fact that less of her body is the same as pre-accident Jenna’s. In response, Lily claims that “percentages can’t define your identity,” suggesting that neither the number of memories nor the amount of a person’s original body they have determines who they really are. Meanwhile, when Jenna speculates that she might be refusing to believe her culpability in Kara and Locke’s deaths because “that would mark Jenna’s permanent fall from perfection,” it shows her self-awareness: she knows that she has reacted to her parents’ perfectionism about her in part by internalizing their standards.
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Lily asks why Jenna is telling her these things, instead of telling Jenna’s father or Claire. Jenna, who remembers that she always used to talk to Lily about things she couldn’t share with her parents, wonders whether the question is a test. Jenna tells Lily that she remembers Lily was good at not overreacting—and that it’s hard trying to be perfect all the time. What happens if you fail? Lily replies that you become like everyone else. Then she asks what Jenna was looking for when she “turned into a human tornado.” Jenna, glad that Lily used the word “human,” explains that she was looking for a red skirt she bought with Kara—something different from all the blue clothes Claire bought her.
Jenna is talking to Lily rather than her parents because she always used to talk to Lily. Thus, the regrowth of her relationship with Lily post-accident links her pre- and post-accident selves. When Jenna says that failing to be perfect just makes you like everyone else, meanwhile, it suggests that Jenna always liked talking to Lily because Lily had no patience for Jenna’s parents’ toxic perfectionism. Jenna’s happiness when Lily calls her a “human” tornado shows that Jenna is still worried about whether other people who know about her prostheses—and perhaps Lily in particular—view her as authentically human. Finally, the mention of the red skirt, which symbolizes Kara’s impact on Jenna’s identity, reminds readers that Jenna is trying to recover the parts of her pre-accident identity related to Kara and Locke.
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Jenna asks again why all Lily’s stuff ended up in this garage. Lily explains that Claire called her when the first safehouse Claire and Jenna’s father found fell through. Claire wanted Lily to buy a house that Jenna’s father’s old friend Edward had found for them. When Jenna points out that Lily could have bought the house without living in it, Lily says that Claire, her beloved daughter, “begged” her to come—and that Claire wanted her to be part of the “escape plan.” If the police find out about Jenna, Lily is supposed to take her to Edward, who will take her out of the country while Claire and Jenna’s father run interference.
Despite Lily’s extreme reservations about Jenna’s parents’ behavior, she still helped Claire because Claire “begged”—a choice that both parallels and contrasts Lily’s self-sacrificing but critical love of Claire with Claire’s intense but smothering love of Jenna. Meanwhile, the revelations about the “escape plan” emphasize that, by law, Jenna ought to be dead. Given that Jenna is a sympathetic protagonist, this seems to imply that in the novel’s view, the biotechnical regulations in place in this near-future world are too strict.
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Abruptly, Jenna asks Lily whether her pre-accident self would have wanted this life—would have wanted “what I am now.” Lily replies that it depends on what Jenna is now. Jenna says she doesn’t know what she is.
That Jenna asks Lily about what her pre-accident self would have wanted further illustrates her trust that Lily will tell her the truth, in contrast with her distrust of her loving but deceitful parents. At the same time, Jenna’s confusion over “what I am now” suggests she still doubts not only her identity but also her humanity—as she refers to herself as a “what,” not a “who.”
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Identity. Jenna looks up the word “identity,” one of whose definitions is “separate or distinct existence.” Yet she thinks about how badly she wants to be Allys’s friend despite the danger Allys poses to her and decides that her identity is bound up with other people.
Here Jenna explicitly indicates that “separate or distinct existence” does not define identity. Rather, relationships like her friendship with Allys define her identity. By implication, Jenna is suggesting not only that individual identities grow out of interpersonal relationships, but also that a person’s memory or body is less important than their friends and family in determining who they are.
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