A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life by Dana Reinhardt

 

I found this while cleaning and must have bought it ages ago when I was still in my YA phase because I don't remember getting it at all. A BRIEF CHAPTER IN MY IMPOSSIBLE LIFE is a 2000s-era YA about a girl whose parents are both very into politics: her mother is a lawyer for the ACLU and her father is a political cartoonist. One day, they drop a huge bombshell: Simone's parents aren't her biological parents at all. She's the adopted daughter of a Hasidic Jewish woman who gave her up for adoption at sixteen.

For the time this was written, this tackles a lot of interesting subjects. The heroine and her family are non-religious (agnostics, I believe). Her biological mother is dying from terminal ovarian cancer. It talks about the realities of what it means to be pro-choice, and how the decisions to give up a child you can't take care of are never easy. It also discusses sex in a fairly non-judgmental way for the time. Simone's best friend Cleo is very sexually active and more developed, and Simone is jealous but not super shamey, which I liked.

There wasn't a lot of interesting conflict in this book and it was pretty sad, even though I would say the ending is more life-affirming than tragic. It also captures the way people talked in the 2000s pretty well, which means that sometimes the language is un-PC, like Simone jokingly calls her gay best friend a "h*mo." I probably wouldn't recommend this to most people, unless they were looking for a YA that does a really good job with current issues, but man, what a brave and daring debut.

2.5 out of 5 stars