Not A Lot That Was New

I was a big fan of The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. I found the sequel, The Fox Inheritance, to be a lot more traditional dystopian future story.

My recollection of Jenna Fox is that it was a more complex and subtle story, without clear bad guys. The Fox Inheritance has a very archvillain type of character, and he is a scientist. Scientists are often the heavies in dystopian novels. The main characters are being pursued through a Big- Brother-can-see-you kind of world. I didn't feel I was seeing a lot there that I hadn't seen before.

There were some aspects of the book that I wish had been developed more or even had become the focus of an entirely different story. Two secondary characters have been alive for hundreds of years. One has outlived her husband by a long, long time. The other has buried six of them. So what would that be like, outliving everyone you know, over and over again? I wish Pearson had written that book. Though, of course, that probably wouldn't have been YA.

Plot Project: Sometimes when I'm speculating about plots, I have to wonder about the initial idea for the story. I'm speculating here that Pearson wanted to write about two characters who are sort of just referred to in The Adoration of Jenna Fox. This may have been a story that began with characters. Then the author had to come up with a situation for them, and then a plot. I would have found that a difficult thing to do.