Book Description

TEXT FOR AUTHOR BIO: Mary Hoffman Wolf lives in Carol Stream, Illinois with her husband and three children. She has worked as an English Teacher at both the junior high and senior high levels and is now serving as Director of Children's Ministries at Fellowship Church of Carol Stream. TEXT FOR BOOK DESCRIPTION: Thirty year old Zoe DeYoung, the label-loving, emotionally impaired librarian at Lane High School in Chicago, is determined to live out her pathetically infertile, loveless life in peace. Fully convinced that human relationships of any kind would be detrimental to her emotional health, she refers to the gigantic glass and steel monoliths that constitute the heart of the city as her best friends; and counts a pen and paper as her only reliable therapists. When her colleague, Marcus Jones, offers her the perfect third floor flat to live out her self-imposed exile from humanity, Zoe meets his wife, Anna Jones, a thoroughly modern, white farm girl who has turned her back on her past by marrying a black man and taking up residence in the city. The bond of a friendship born of quiet desperation soon becomes the anchor of both their lives. Sharing the pleasure of a chocolate bar is easy; learning to share the pain they are both trying so hard to ignore is the challenge. Encouraged by Zoe's quest to embrace all that life has to offer (outside of human relations), Anna takes a chance that may prove fatal. To sustain her friend, Zoe must then risk opening up her heart beyond aesthetics to real relationships by becoming a second mother to Anna's children, reconciling with her own banished family, and learning to love a man who is the antithesis of what she thinks she's always wanted. In the end, both Anna and Zoe get mroe than they ever bargained for.