Women are constantly pressured with the overwhelming message that achieving 'perfect beauty' is mandatory to be accepted and successful. Mercedes survived a childhood with a hateful and mentally ill mother who constantly called her an 'ugly duckling.' Now, at twenty-nine, she's a brilliant financial icon in Beverly Hills. She knew she was not beautiful, or stunning, or even close to either. She was plain, simple, and ordinary. Take this journey with Mercedes and her four friends, who live in a city that judges a woman solely by her outside, and not her inside. Will the pressure to obtain...

At nineteen, Ema Vaduva was pregnant when she was forced to leave Romania. For twenty-eight years, Ema and her daughter, Daniela, lived a modest and reclusive life. They were inseparable until one fatal day-Ema dies. That day would change Dani's life forever. She had never been all alone and with no family to call her own. Then one afternoon while cleaning out her mother's closet, she finds a brown box. Are the secrets to her mother's past tucked inside? Feeling alone and desperate, and with nothing else to lose, Dani's goes in search of answers. Will that brown box hold the answers to Ema's...