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I shouldn’t like Dana Reinhardt’s A Brief Chapter in my Impossible Life. The book – about a teenage girl who finally meets her biological mother after living 16 years with her adopted parents – is clumsy and obvious. A lot of characters – the adoptive parents, the main character’s friends – are just sketched and don’t have a ton of depth.
But I did like A Brief Chapter. And the main reason is that I liked the main character, confused teenager Simone. Though some of her thoughts and dialogue are a bit too clever and sophisticated for a teen, she has the right blend of sarcastic wit and aching insecurity that characterizes a lot of teen girls.
The story centers on her reunion with her biological mom, Rivka, who seeks Simone out suddenly and wants to have a relationship with her. There are a lot of ways this story could have gone. It could have been overly melodramatic, the story of a girl torn between a new life and an old one. Yet, to her credit, Reinhardt makes this story more about becoming whole and merging all of the aspects of your life together to create the person you will become.
It helps that Rivka is as lovingly drawn as Simone. She
is never depicted as cold or selfish – just as a smart young woman who got pregnant too young and feared that her Hassidic father would reject her if she kept the baby. Rivka also has other secrets, which are part of the reason why she’s decided to reconnect with Simone.
A Brief Chapter is clunky in spots and would have benefited from paring off some of the peripheral characters, but it’s sweet and touching and entertaining. Rivka and Simone are likable people worth spending time with.
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A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life