Baby's Breath is a novel about a mother-daughter relationship in the crucible of a horrific act.  The daughter, Alyssa, hides a pregnancy, gives birth in secret and abandons her newborn in a subway station.  Does this sound familiar?  Of course it does:  the idea for the novel came from contemporary newspaper headlines.  Anna Tuttle Villegas and I noticed how many accounts mentioned that the girls who did this--like the "prom mom," for example-- were considered "good girls," and close to their middle-class parents.  Both of us are parents of college-age daughters; both of us thought "my daughter couldn't do that," even as we had to realize that the mothers of the girls who'd done it had believed exactly that. 

We began to research the phenomenon.  We talked to lawyers, doctors, a women's jail warden.  We read trial transcripts, paying close attention to what psychiatrists had had to say.  We studied the interviews and news accounts and simply tried to understand.  Baby's Breath is the result of that effort made into literature.    Our hope is that we take the reader on a cathartic journey to understanding even as s/he is captivated by a well-told story.

Click here to read what Publisher's Weekly and social activists and legislators have said about  the novel.

To order this book from the publisher, click here