Not My Daughter » (Reprint)

Barbara Delinsky started out her writing career creating novels for the category romance genre, partly under pseudonyms; but she has evolved into a name-brand all her own, praised by romance fans for the layered plotting and the complex characters on display in literally dozens of bestsellers.

A pregnancy pact between three teenaged girls puts their mothers' love to the ultimate test in this explosive new novel from Barbara Delinsky, "a first- rate storyteller who creates characters as familiar as your neighbors." (Boston Globe)

When Susan Tate's seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, announces she is pregnant, Susan is stunned. A single mother, she has struggled to do everything right. She sees the pregnancy as an unimaginable tragedy for both Lily and herself.

Then comes word of two more pregnancies among high school juniors who happen to be Lily's best friends-and the town turns to talk of a pact. As fingers start pointing, the most ardent criticism is directed at Susan. As principal of the high school, she has always been held up as a role model of hard work and core values. Now her detractors accuse her of being a lax mother, perhaps not worthy of the job of shepherding impressionable students. As Susan struggles with the...

Kirkus Reviews

Mother-daughter bonding, knitting and a ripped-from-the-headlines plot from Delinsky (While My Sister Sleeps, 2009, etc.). Three high-school seniors form a pact to become pregnant. Sound familiar? But Lily, Mary Kate and Jess are the top girls, academically, athletically and socially, in the Maine coastal village of Zaganack. Boasting old roots and rigid values, this company town for an upscale retailer is scandalized. Most of the scandal comes from the fact that Lily's mother Susan is the high-school principal. The old men on the school board are outraged at the example the three girls have set, and all fingers are pointing in Susan's direction. Not only is she a bit of a progressive-she's established a medical clinic at the school and prefers counseling to punishment-Susan too was pregnant and unmarried at 17. When Lily was a baby, Susan bonded with fellow new mothers Kate (Mary Kate's mom) and Sunny (tightly wound parent of Jess); the women have been best friends ever since, and all three are devastated by their daughter's incomprehensible decision. At PC Wool, a division of the posh retailer that they created and run together, they spend Saturdays dyeing yarn and trying to figure out why their girls traded in bright futures for teenage motherhood. While Susan fights for her job, she revisits her painful past (her own parents shamed and disowned her) and begins to connect more deeply with Lily's father Rick, a globetrotting journalist who may be ready to stay home. Problems arise with the health of Lily's baby, the involvement of the babies' fathers and the stability of PC Wools, but by novel's end, everything is so neatly and happily resolved that readers may wonder what the fuss wasabout. Delinsky has a knack for exploring the battlefields of contemporary life, and this emotionally intelligent, though formulaic, new novel offers her fans what they want-high drama and romantic realism. First printing of 225,000