Divorce left Harper Szymanski with a name no one can spell, a house she can't afford, and a teenage daughter who's pulling away. With her fledgling virtual-assistant business, she's scrambling to maintain her overbearing mother's ridiculous Susie Homemaker standards and still pay the bills, thanks to clients like Lucas, the annoying playboy cop who claims he hangs around for Harper's fresh-baked cookies. Spending half her life in school hasn't prepared...

"In rural West Virginia, Joanie and her foster siblings live on a farm tending a mysterious plant called the vine. The older girls are responsible for cultivating the vine, performing sacred rituals to make it grow. After Joanie's arranged marriage goes horribly wrong, leaving her widowed and with a baby, she plots her escape with the help of her foster brother Cello. But before they can get away, her baby goes missing and Joanie, desperate to find...

While Gabby Schaefer reels in the face of crushing news that has thwarted her plans to return to work, Hayley Batchelor pursues high-risk fertility treatments and Nicole Lord fears falling in love after emerging from a divorce from a man who barely touched her heart.

Short stories.

In the wake of the apocalypse, Flora has come of age in a highly gendered post-plague society where females have become a precious, coveted, hunted, and endangered commodity. But Flora does not participate in the economy that trades in bodies. An anathema in a world that prizes procreation above all else, she is an outsider everywhere she goes, including the thriving all-female city of Shy. Now navigating a blighted landscape, Flora, her friends,...

"Face is a book of fictional vignettes that examines the fear and vestigial evolutionary habits that have caused women and men to cultivate the imagined reality that older women's faces are unattractive, undesirable, and something to be 'fixed.' Based on 'older face' experiences of the author, Justine Bateman, and those of dozens of women and men she interviewed, the book presents the reader with the many root causes for society's often negative attitudes...