Seventeen-year-old Jenna Fox has just woken up from a year-long coma after a car accident. At least, that's what her parents tell her, but she can't remember anything at all from the accident or from her life before it. And she has a lot of questions. What happened to her in the past year? Why have her parents moved all the way across the country to a remote house in California? And why does her grandmother look at her like she's a stranger?
Whew - I picked this up on the recommendation of a library coworker, and she didn't steer me wrong. But I'm not sure how far to go with the spoilers on this one. Suffice it to say that this is set in a near-future world where a lot of new things are now medically possible, and the ethics of how far people will go to save a human life are coming into question. Right off the bat you can tell that something more is wrong than just amnesia after a long coma, but only slowly do we understand what's really happened, as Jenna pieces the clues together. Some of the medical technology seems a little far-fetched to me, even for that wonderful nebulous setting known as "the future." And the ending came a bit too quickly and left a lot of the ethical questions that were raised unresolved. Still, it was a page-turner and a thought-provoking read, I did like Jenna a lot as a character, and I thought the issues of identity that the book brought up were well-done.