SPLIT JUST RIGHT

A teenager learns some unpleasant truths about her parents in this deceptively light-toned portrait of a two-member family. Although constant rehearsals and several part-time jobs keep her mother, Susan, so much on the fly that they seldom eat together and only communicate with notes, Danny still feels close to her; when she finds out from others that her mother has lost her bread-and-butter TV-commercial job and is waitressing to make ends meet, Danny is mystified and angry at the deception. As a stubborn silence grows between them, Danny mourns the lack of any other family member to talk to. She knows her father only from a photograph, her mother's talk of courtship and divorce, and her own daydreams. She tracks him down, resulting in a reunion that's anything but the loving scene she had envisioned: In a series of painful revelations she learns that she's the result of a summer fling, that her parents never married, and that they had agreed to go their separate ways after her mother refused to have an abortion. Griffin (Rainy Season, 1996) creates a pair of appealing characters: the elder breezy, vivacious, and funny; the younger quieter, taller, and in several ways the more mature of the two. Their chemistry animates a plot that could have easily turned soapy and leaden. Some comic twists also lighten the load, as does an upbeat ending and Danny and Susan's emergence from the crisis even closer than they were before. (Fiction. 11-13)