What Pretty Gets You
19-year-old Maia works a kiosk at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting to be discovered and watching people’s lives take off while hers stays stagnant. When a handsome commuter charms her with stories of the perfect life in the snow-capped mountains of Colorado, she rashly follows him into a future she was not expecting.
Desperate to regain control of her life and sentenced to bedrest in her second pregnancy, Carolyn makes the dangerous decision to hire the young woman she suspects is sleeping with her husband to be their nanny. Friends close; beautiful enemies closer, she reasons.
Carolyn and Maia harbor secret pasts. What unfolds in Boulder over the summer exposes the gritty underbelly of their dreams and forces both women to question the bounds of loyalty, the complicated nature of female friendship, and the privilege and peril of physical beauty.
Chosen
In the spirit of Jodi Picoult and Anna Quindlen, CHOSEN features a young caseworker increasingly entangled in the lives of the adoptive and birth parents she represents, and who faces life-altering choices when an extortion attempt goes horribly wrong.
It all begins with a fantasy: the caseworker in her “signing paperwork” charcoal suit, paired with beaming parents cradling their adopted newborn, against a fluorescent-lit delivery room backdrop. It’s this blissful picture that keeps Chloe Pinter, director of The Chosen Child’s domestic adoption program, happy juggling the high demands of her boss and the incessant needs of parents on both sides.
But the job that offers Chloe refuge from her turbulent personal life and Portland’s winter rains soon becomes a battleground itself involving three very different couples: the Novas, college sweethearts who suffered fertility problems but are now expecting their own baby; the McAdoos, a wealthy husband and desperate wife for whom adoption is a last chance; and Jason and Penny, an impoverished couple who have nothing-except the baby everyone wants. When a child goes missing, dreams dissolve into nightmares, and everyone is forced to examine what they really want and where it all went wrong.