Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg – författare

Hannah Webber fears she will never be a mother, but her prayers are finally answered when she gives birth to a son. In an era of high-stakes parenting, nurturing Sam’s intellect becomes Hannah’s life purpose. She invests body and soul into his development, much to the detriment of her marriage. She convinces herself, however, that Sam’s acceptance at age fourteen to the most prestigious of New England boarding schools overseen by an illustrious headmaster, justifies her choices.

When he arrives at Dunning, Sam is glad to be out from under his mother’s close watch. And he enjoys his newfound freedom―until, late one night, he stumbles upon evidence of sexual misconduct at the school and is unable to shake the discovery.

Both a coming-of-age novel and a portrait of an evolving mother-son relationship, The Nine is the story of a young man who chooses to expose a corrupt world operating under its own set of rules―even if it means jeopardizing his mother’s hopes and dreams.

Becca Meister Fitzpatrick, wife, mother, grandmother, and pillar of the community, is the dutiful steward of her family’s iconic summer tradition until she discovers her recently deceased husband squandered their nest egg. While coming to terms with what is likely to be her last season in Long Harbor, she decides to introduce the child she gave up for adoption fifty years prior to the family. Inspired by her granddaughter’s acceptance in the face of impending single-motherhood, Becca summons the courage to reveal the secret she’d been forced to bury. The question is how her daughter, Rachel, will react. They’d always had a strained relationship, made rockier when Rachel came home from college with an unplanned pregnancy of her own.

Eden is the account of the days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, as Becca prepares to disclose her secret, and her son and brothers conspire to put the estate on the market, interwoven with the century old history of Becca’s family, of her parents’ beginnings and ascent into affluence, and of her mother’s own secret struggles in the grand home her father named “Eden.”

Days after graduating from college, Betsabé Ruiz begins her first job on Wall Street, where she plans to save enough money to eventually pursue her dreams of becoming a theatre actress. What she didn’t anticipate was that this job would allow her barely enough free time to sleep or hang out with friends, let alone take acting classes. She didn’t apprehend the magnitude of the wealth that would be swirling about her, either, or how the long hours and close quarters would infuse her professional relationships with intimacy. Still, she does her best to navigate this uncharted territory at work, where she makes an unlikely best friend and develops an unexpected attraction to her boss.

Told in the retrospective as a letter to her unborn son, Daughter of a Promise is a coming-of-age tale in which a naïve Betsabé assumed leaving her past behind was the prerequisite for succeeding as an adult. The wisdom she ultimately passes on to her child, however, is steeped in the very traditions within which her grandmother raised her back in Miami.

A modern retelling of the legend of Bathsheba and David, this novel is a reminder that the biological forces of desire and love are timeless and complicated.