Literary Criticism: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

I visited several websites which all debated the negatives and positives of The Adoration of Jenna Fox using facts and quotes from the book. I basically found the same ideas and opinions on the book on several websites, amazon book website and a few blogger's websites, one, two and three. Several people mentioned the intriguing questions this book aroused, such as, how far would a parent go for their child's life, how much does memory play a role in making us the person we are today, some debatable questions on medical ethics and many more. Most of the people liked the fact that Mary E. Pearson brought up some of these questions in her writing, showing both sides of the argument in the book, leaving you to come up with the answers. In addition, many people thought that the book had a wonderful set up, but left you hanging a little too much, meaning there was not enough information describing the outcome of too many scenes and some critical scenes seemed "simplified". I can agree with the idea of Mary Pearson simplifying the book for the most part, but there were several scenes where she went into thorough detail, which is why I disagree that the entire book was simplified. I think Mary Pearson really thought about which scenes needed detail and which scenes would be better off letting the reader figure it out. In the scene when Jenna's father says Bio Gel is, "an artificial neural network built on a biological model. It's condensed, oxygenated gel that is filled with neural chips. These chips are as small as human neurons, and the wonderful thing is, they communicate and pass messages in the same way human neurons do, through chemical neurotransmitters," (126) Mary Pearson is going into thorough detail describing Bio Gel. On the other hand, there were situations when Mary Pearson does not tell you enough. For instance, I knew the computers which Jenna found hidden in her parents closet, bolted down to a surface, contained all the information of Jenna, Locke, and Kara's brains, but I did not know why the father needed to keep them as "back ups". Mary Pearson never specified what kind of situation would demand for the use of these computers. The father in the book just said that him and his wife kept them just in case. This is one of the many situations where I was left to figure it out on my own. This is not always a bad thing, some readers enjoy it when the writer leaves you to form your own opinions and ideas, but they must not leave too much information out or else it leaves you puzzled. All in all, I enjoyed the book and I recommend it, but I wish there were not so many important details left out of the book.