The Island Decides

1971: Two lost girls on Maui. One gets found. The other must find herself.

Struggling to survive as a single mother, Carrie Ann Emerson has made a home for herself and her four-year-old daughter in the San Francisco hippie community of Haight-Ashbury.

Then little Rorie disappears. Frantic, Carrie Ann searches for her child. When word comes that Rorie has turned up in a hippie commune on the Hawaiian island of Maui, Carrie Ann must rush to this faraway place before her daughter can be put up for adoption. But the judge, skeptical about a mother who somehow managed to misplace her child, will return Rorie only if the two stay on Maui. Now Carrie Ann must make their lives anew.

Maui has its benefits--like meeting Michael. Certain that she needs a man to get by in this world, hoping to find a father for Rorie, Carrie Ann thinks handsome, sexy, Michael might be the one she's searching for.

But how much of herself must she give up to hold on to him? And, with or without a man, can Carrie Ann be the kind of mother her little girl needs?

Volume 1, The Maui Trilogy

85,800 words