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Sixteen-year-old Simone has always known she’s adopted, and has never wanted to know more, not even when her birth mother calls out of the blue. Simone’s got plenty of other things going on already. There’s collecting signatures for her mom (a lawyer for the ACLU) outside the Organic Oasis on the weekends; the Atheist Student Association and school paper; her crush on the paper’s editor; her best friend who’s starting to have sex with a jerk; and her younger brother who is suddenly a completely hot and popular freshman. Simone does get to know her birth mother, a 33-year-old estranged from her Hasidic family, and dying of cancer. Is there a little too much of every possible issue in this story? Possibly. Faith and agnosticism, drinking and puking, sex and virginity and love, Reinhardt brings it all to readers, but she does so in very realistic doses, with a sense of humor and a sense of hope. Simone’s first-person voice is funny and unforgettable—a little too wise, perhaps, but her epiphanies are on target and are what readers will be looking for in this fabulous debut. (Fiction. YA)
