Randomize ME

In ONE GOOD FRIEND DESERVES ANOTHER, three women try to save their Indian-American friend from an arranged marriage.

I have three teenage daughters. One afternoon, while they were dragging their jeans-sagging, scruffy boyfriends toward the family room XBOX, I turned to my Roman Catholic husband and said: “Is it too late to convert to Hinduism so we can arrange their marriages?”

. . . and that was the beginning of ONE GOOD FRIEND DESERVES ANOTHER.

Dhara Pitalia is most definitely the heart of the book!

Raised by traditional Hindu parents, she was educated in a private Catholic school and brought up in an neighborhood where Hebrew, Spanish and Hindi are all spoken widely. So, like many of us, Dhara is uniquely American in that she straddles many worlds.

But after the breakup of a long-term relationship with a man she’d loved since college, she decides the American way of romance hasn’t worked for her, and decides to let her parents do the choosing. That choice shocks her friends . . . and has surprising consequences for all of them.

My day job is my three teenage daughters! They don’t like it much, but their antics often find their way into my stories.

As for alternate careers — I was once a chemist. I worked for years testing soil, air and water for EPA organic priority pollutants. You’ll find pieces of that in ONE GOOD FRIEND DESERVES ANOTHER in the character of Kelly, who’s a bit of a science geek.

My next book, FRIENDSHIP MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER, is coming out in March 2013 and this is truly a book-of-the-heart!

It’s the story of Monique, a young widow whose husband left her a “bucket list” of things they’d wanted to do together before he died.

For four years, Monique puts off doing the list, too busy with raising their daughter to fulfill broken dreams. But when a next door neighbor, Judy, starts acting crazy in her empty nest, and another good friend, Becky, receives traumatic news, Monique gives that bucket list a new look.

She and her friends are in desperate need of a fresh perspective . . . and that old list of wishes just might save them all.