Choices (ePub)

What's a girl to do?

It's 1941. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, sending America into the war and dashing the innocent plans of so many-one of them Dottie Mahoney, mother goose to her seven younger Irish-American siblings. She's graduated high school in Home Economics, has a job that is just that-a job-and has been expecting Henry Quentin to propose at any moment.

But Henry enlists, and Dottie's three younger brothers will soon be joining him, she knows, leaving her and so many other young women to hold down the home front. She becomes a hostess at the USO, passes out home-baked cookies, smiles, dances till her feet hurt, and writes letters to lonely servicemen overseas-hundreds of them. One, Ed Lane, returns from the war and proposes to her. She is torn, and not sure why.

Caught up in WWII and the "Cold War" that follows, Dottie cannot escape turbulent times. Along with daily war-time duties like rationing, she faces family problems, race riots, antisemitism at home and news of genocide abroad; and soon, when one war ends and another kind of war begins, she and everyone she knows will face "The Atomic Age." Even the "Fabulous Fifties," she will discover, are volatile in their own way...

Caire Lane is a true story teller. In CHOICES, she gives us Dottie, a 19-year-old girl and the eldest in a large, close-knit family that suffers great losses during WWll, and follows Dottie's life through several periods of history in beautiful, poetic language. I couldn't put it down.

-Barbara Cairns, author of Rachel's Next Chapter and Nettie's Dream

Caire Lane's debut novella, Choices, shows a deft hand at storytelling-at giving us characters we can care about against an epic backdrop-and delivers a heroine it's hard not to fall in love with (in all the right ways). Dottie Mahoney isn't just a young woman coming of age and surviving the challenges of a 20th Century world that seems unable to escape turmoil. She is also the embodiment of the human spirit William Faulkner talks about in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and we feel that spirit to the very last page. Can't wait to see what Lane gives us next.

-Bruce McAllister, author of Dream Baby and The Village Sang to the Sea