Rules for 50/50 Chances by Kate McGovern (review)

Life in the shadow of her mother’s cruelly incapacitating Huntington’s disease has been the norm for seventeen-year-old Rose for the last several years. Now, however, the issue has come to the fore: Rose is deciding where to go to college and realizing that means leaving her family behind, and she’s approaching the age where she can get tested to find out if she has inherited the disease herself. How will it affect her family if she leaves—and how will it affect them if she finds out her genetic future? Debut novelist McGovern explores this challenging subject with candor and sympathy, allowing Rose an honest blend of sorrow and frustration at her mother’s illness. Rose’s relationship with Caleb, a boy she meets at a rare disease event whose mother and sisters have sickle cell, is unusually authentic in its glitches and uncertainty; McGovern uses Rose’s naïveté about race (Caleb is African American, Rose is white) to illuminate the fact that she’s not used to seeing beyond her own problems. The book is a little overstuffed with theme and event, but ultimately Rose’s experience is compelling, and it will make many young people consider what they would do in her shoes. There are no notes, but the acknowledgments section points to Huntington’s disease websites and a source text.