Teen mother Emoni Santiago struggles with the challenges of finishing high school and her dream of working as a chef.

Set against the dazzling backdrop of Golden Age Hollywood, novelist Anne Girard tells the enchanting story of Jean Harlow, one of the most iconic stars in the history of film It's the Roaring Twenties and seventeen-year-old Harlean Carpenter McGrew has run off to Beverly Hills. She's chasing a dream--to escape her small, Midwestern life and see her name in lights. In California, Harlean has everything a girl could want--a rich husband, glamorous parties,...

In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility-- much like Maggie Hughes' parents. Maggie's English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don't include marriage to the poor French boy the next farm over. But Maggie's heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents send the baby Elodie to an orphanage where she receives horrible treatment. Seventeen years later,...

A compelling novel about a bed-and-breakfast that houses three generations of women- and their many secrets.
In the early 1960s, Ruby, a spunky unwed teen mother, was wooed and won over by the founder of the McCloud Home. Now, forty years later, the historic property has been converted into an inn that Ruby runs with one of her daughters, Jill. When Jill's fourteen-year-old daughter begins to search for the identity of her father, she...

At seventeen, Rosalind Townsend finds herself pregnant and alone. Her father, deeply religious yet cruel, throws her out of the house. Nick Pemberton, her baby's father and the man she naively hoped to marry, rejects her. Yet even at the lowest point in her life, Rosalind vows to succeed on her own terms, and to give her son, Will, all the love and happiness she's been denied.

" A moving debut novel about two mothers-one biological and one adoptive-from a compelling new voice in Southern women's fiction. One baby girl. Two strong Southern women. And the most difficult decision they'll ever make. Frances "Khaki" Mason has it all: a thriving interior design career, a loving husband and son, homes in North Carolina and Manhattan-everything except the second child she has always wanted. Jodi, her husband's nineteen-year-old...

"Gail and Jon Durbin moved to the Chicago suburbs to set up house as soon as Gail got pregnant. But then she miscarried-- once, twice, three times. Determined to expand their family, the Durbins turn to adoption. When several adoptions fall through, Gail's desire for a child overwhelms her. Carli is a pregnant teenager from a blue-collar town nearby, with dreams of going to college and getting out of her mother's home. When she makes the gut-wrenching...

"Alex Halstad, a childless-by-choice interior designer and dog mom, is a true perfectionist. But her orderly life turns chaotic when the teenage daughter her husband, Barry, never knew he had shows up on their doorstep...with a baby girl of her own in tow. While Alex's dog enthusiastically welcomes the new arrivals, Alex struggles with the loss of her steady routine"--

"Cassandra McMurtrey has the best parents a girl could ask for; they've given Cass a life she wouldn't trade for the world. She has everything she needs--but she has questions, too. Like, to know who she is. Where she came from. Questions her adoptive parents can't answer, no matter how much they love her. But eighteen years ago, someone wrote Cass a series of letters. And they may just hold the answers Cass has been searching for. Alternating between...

After being away for two years, Riley Young returns to Lawton, Alabama, with her fifteen-month-old daughter to help take care of her grandmother who has Alzheimers, even though it means she has to face the lies that forced her to leave town in the first place and a blossoming friendship with the high school football star Brady Higgens, who is dealing with his own family problems. Two years after being raped, Riley Young returns to Lawton, Alabama,...