cover image Ground Rules: What I Learned My Daughter's Fifteenth Year

Ground Rules: What I Learned My Daughter's Fifteenth Year

Sherril Jaffe. Kodansha America, $20 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-56836-172-7

Most parents could benefit from this candid and helpful account of one year in the life of a mother of teenagers. Jaffe (The Unexamined Wife), who lives in San Francisco, has two daughters, Rebekah, 14, and Beanie, a seventh-grader on the brink of adolescence. Although she describes here some of the good times she shares with her younger daughter, the focus is on Rebekah, who confounds her parents (Jaffe's husband is a rabbi) by lying about her whereabouts, running away from home to live with a friend and convincing her sister to steal money out of Jaffe's purse. The author and her husband cope by talking to other parents of teens and by consulting experts. Eventually they work out their own ways of dealing with their daughter, which are based on love and the understanding that life with an adolescent is filled with pitfalls. What makes this memoir different from others on the subject is Jaffe's admission that she does not have the answers, only the will to persevere. (May)