The teen years are hard enough without having to cope with a parent whose behaviour has turned embarrassing and frightening. Sylvie’s wonderful mother, once a meticulous housekeeper, great teacher, and loving friend, has inexplicably become a slob, prone to tantrums in supermarkets, and may even be suicidal.

In her seventh novel, Ishbel Moore, a Winnipeg writer for young people, takes on the territory of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Mercifully, few young readers will have to go through such an ordeal with a parent, but many will have grandparents or know of older people affected by this all-too-common disease. Moore is very good at depicting the dramatic, bewildering shifts of mood, lapses of memory, and changes in personality. She movingly conveys the pain and guilt the family feel over losing a loved one even before physical death occurs.

While Daughter is very much in the “bibliotherapy” genre, young people whose families are not affected by Alzheimer’s disease can and will read this book with interest. Moore takes care to develop Sylvie as a believable and sympathetic 14-year-old, struggling to protect her mother while staying afloat through the turgid currents of puberty. Her friendships and her marks suffer, but happily, there is a boy, miraculously sensitive enough to see past his hormones to realize that Sylvie is having a rough time. Sylvie’s life at school – best friends, cliques, outcasts, good teachers, bad teachers – tends toward the formulaic, but then most adolescences seem to. Moore’s writing is solid and straightforward, and her message – “However bad you think you’ve got it, remember there’s always someone who’s got it worse” – is a worthwhile one by anyone’s standards.