The ending falls flat as the plot devolves into comic-book territory. But Adam belongs to a resistance movement he helps Juliette escape to their stronghold, where she finds that she’s not the only one with superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch.

After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate-Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy. Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell.

Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins. Though action scenes are occasionally predictable or over too soon, the book's timely and haunting questions will leave thoughtful readers with much to ponder.Ī dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself. Is Locke human, his consciousness uploaded into a taller, more malleable body? Is Kara, who has lost her compassion? What about Dot, a legless robot engineered only to drive a cab, who is nonetheless strong-willed, brave and rebellious?

Their journey from Gatsbro's facility through a greatly changed America and ultimately toward Jenna Fox, still alive in her BioGel body, is harrowing and eye-opening, but the heart of the story is its meditation on what it means to be human. Then Kara discovers the exploitative ends for which he is keeping them, and the two flee their captivity with the (perhaps too convenient) help of an unexpected ally. Both traumatized and connected to each other by the years their minds spent locked in claustrophobic “environments,” the pair live for a year with Gatsbro, the doctor who brought them back.

Some 260 years after Jenna Fox's father used controversial technology to upload Jenna's mind into an imitation body, Jenna's friends Locke and Kara, presumed dead in the same car accident, are uploaded into new bodies of their own. In a thought-provoking, atmospheric follow-up to The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008), Pearson again contemplates bioengineering and the nature of humanity.

The Fox Inheritance by Mary E. Pearson