Then Came You
A Novel
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3.8 • 153 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An unexpected love story…
Jules Strauss is a Princeton senior with a full scholarship, acquaintances instead of friends, and a family she’s ashamed to invite to Parents’ Weekend. With the income she’ll receive from donating her “pedigree” eggs, she believes she can save her father from addiction.
Annie Barrow married her high school sweetheart and became the mother to two boys. After years of staying at home and struggling to support four people on her husband’s salary, she thinks she’s found a way to recover a sense of purpose and bring in some extra cash.
India Bishop, thirty-eight (really forty-three), has changed everything about herself: her name, her face, her past. In New York City, she falls for a wealthy older man, Marcus Croft, and decides a baby will ensure a happy ending. When her attempts at pregnancy fail, she turns to technology, and Annie and Jules, to help make her dreams come true.
But each of their plans is thrown into disarray when Marcus’ daughter Bettina, intent on protecting her father, becomes convinced that his new wife is not what she seems…
With startling tenderness and laugh-out-loud humor, Jennifer Weiner once again takes readers into the heart of women’s lives in an unforgettable, timely tale that interweaves themes of class and entitlement, surrogacy and donorship, the rights of a parent and the measure of motherhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weiner (Best Friends Forever) revisits girls-are-their-own-best-friends territory with this savvy tale of a profoundly unorthodox family, unspooling the impossibly complicated and hopeful tale of how baby Aurora was born. The players: beautiful, lonely Princeton student and egg donor Jules, who uses the proceeds from selling her eggs to help save her drug-addled dad; surrogate Annie, a restless married mom-of-two trying to dig her way out of debt, a lifelong rivalry with her successful sister, and a marital rut; Bettina, India's step-daughter, who feels betrayed by her divorced parents and is desperate to rebuild the imagined happiness of her youth; and Aurora's legal mom, India, a gold digger who inadvertently falls in love with the man she married for money. Their individual paths to each other, and Aurora, are related in alternating chapters narrated by each woman, told with equal parts love and longing whether it be for a partner, a purpose, or a family. The men in their lives in Jules's case, the woman are inexplicably forgiving and disappointingly superfluous as the gals build a network and a modern village to raise the baby each of whom had a hand in creating.
