When successful Rhode Island real estate agent Lucy Mendoza vanishes, leaving her baby behind in a grocery store parking lot, the news quickly makes national headlines. Lucy’s best friend, Michelle, is devastated, and terrified that Lucy’s life is at stake. But she knows something that could complicate the police investigation. Lucy had confessed something unspeakable: She regretted becoming a mother, so much that she’d fantasized about faking her own kidnapping. If the police and media were to find out, Lucy would become a monster in public opinion. Michelle is sure Lucy would never abandon her daughter. But could she be wrong? Could Lucy have been so desperate she chose to escape her life?

Rose Napolitano is fighting with her husband, Luke, about prenatal vitamins. She promised she'd take them, but didn't. Their marriage has come to rest on this one question: Can Rose find it in herself to become a mother? Rose is a successful professor and academic. She's never wanted to have a child. The fight ends, and with it their marriage. But then Rose has a fight with Luke about the vitamins --- again. This time the fight goes slightly differently, and so does Rose's future as she grapples with whether she can indeed give up the one thing she thought she knew about herself. Can she reimagine her life in a completely new way? That reimagining plays out again and again in each of Rose's nine lives, just as it does for each of us as we grow into adulthood.

As a doctoral candidate, Donna Freitas loved asking big questions, challenging established theories and sinking her teeth into sacred texts. But during her first year, one particular scholar became obsessed with her academic enthusiasm. While his attraction was not overtly sexual, it was undeniably inappropriate and, most importantly, unwanted. In CONSENT, Freitas delivers a forensic examination of the years she spent stalked by her professor, and uses her nightmarish experience to examine the ways in which we stigmatize, debate and attempt to understand consent today.