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A memoir chronicles a mother’s coming to terms with her daughter’s needs after an accident and aiming to provide her with a vibrant life.

On July 1, 1991, Rubin’s 17-year-old daughter, Jenn, suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a car crash. Jenn was initially comatose and needed surgery; she spent more than a year and a half in a rehabilitation facility before moving to a group home. Rubin describes Jenn’s injury as profoundly affecting some parts of her brain while leaving others untouched. Although Jenn learned to walk, eat, and do routine daily tasks, she never regained the ability to speak, communicating only through facial expressions, body language, and nonverbal sounds. Damage to her brain also caused problematic behaviors, such as biting, hiding things, and responding inappropriately to others’ emotions. The Rubins successfully sued the other driver in the crash and established a supplemental-needs trust for their daughter in 1993, the first of its kind in New York state. Rubin effectively details how she longed for the gentle, social, and elegant girl Jenn had been before her injury; however, she came to accept her daughter for who she was. She used funds from the trust to hire dedicated caregivers, buy a car, and provide an extraordinary range of experiences to enrich her daughter’s life, such as going on a trip to Walt Disney World. The author argues convincingly that her daughter and other disabled people should have “the same pleasures and privileges of travel in life as do others in our society.” She also touches on the inadequacy of medical insurance and Medicaid in particular and describes incidents when Jenn was subjected to overt discrimination. Over time, Jenn’s family, her caregivers, and her caregivers’ families became close; she was surrounded by a loving community. Overall, Jenn’s story will offer hope to people hoping for rich, connected, and fun lives for brain-injured loved ones.

An affecting story of how a young woman’s traumatic brain injury took away her language but not her joy.