Bright, witty, and covered in homemade play-dough, Jennifer Bradley has traded her fabulous job at a New York auction house for the life of a stay-at-home mom. No one said it would be easy. Between the alpha moms all around her and a backstabbing mother-in-law, there's little hope that maternal instinct alone will save her. And perhaps it was less than helpful of her husband, Thom, to suddenly take off on business to Singapore for the next who-knows-how-long, leaving behind the faint scent of an extramarital affair. And this may not be the best time for Jennifer's old flame, a former child...

Emmaline Nelson and her sister Birdie grow up in the hard, cold rural Lutheran world of strict parents, strict milking times, and strict morals. Marriage is preordained, the groom practically predestined. Though it's 1958, southern Minnesota did not see changing roles for women on the horizon. Caught in a time bubble between a world war and the ferment of the 1960's, Emmy doesn't see that she has any say in her life, any choices at all. Only when Emmy's fiance shows his true colors and forces himself on her does she find the courage to act--falling instead for a forbidden Catholic boy, a...