The Adoration of Jenna Fox

“I used to be someone” (3). Though The Adoration of Jenna Fox is written in the present tense, Jenna’s first sentence is written in the past tense. At the beginning of the novel, Jenna feels as though she is only a shadow of her previous self, whose memories and personhood were lost after a terrible injury. Though Jenna knows she is “more” than what her parents and grandmother tell her, she’s “not sure what” (3). To Jenna, everything important happened in the past, only accessible through her family and endless home movies. She speaks in the past tense because she has not yet figured out the present.

At the beginning of the novel, Lily describes Jenna’s gait as “‘not natural’” (7), though there are many other things that are unnatural about Jenna at this stage. She speaks in a stilted, overly-formal way and calls her parents “Mother” and “Father” instead of Mom and Dad, and calls her grandmother by her first name. She longs for “a classmate’s simple inquiry” (17). Jenna is aware that something is not quite right—she describes herself and her life as “curious” (11), another overly formal term.

Despite the strangeness of her life, Jenna displays her innate curiosity early on. She is eager to know more and regain what she’s lost. She pores over dictionary definitions and old home movies, approaching both with the focus and attention to detail of an anthropologist. She studies her parents in similar fashion, from a distance. “I don’t love her” (9), she says of Mother. “How can you love someone you don’t know?” (9). She also recognizes that there are things about her that are different, that she has changed since the accident. “Was I always this sensitive to sound?” (11), she wonders, and tries to cope with strange, overpowering memories of floating in a terrible, nightmarish darkness. In this section, a large portion of Jenna’s narration is devoted to questions, showing her desire for honesty and truthfulness from those around her, as well as her dissatisfaction with the small and insular nature of her world:. “A wooden chair. A bare desk. A plain bed. Is this all Jenna Fox adds up to?” (16). In this early section, we are introduced to several of the book’s most important motifs, such as the color blue, and the crumbling, ancient Cotswold cottage as a symbol of Jenna’s own life and eventual growth. Jenna describes the coldness of her room, and notes, “It reflects nothing of the person who inhabits it. Or maybe it does” (15).