This is a story about an adolescent girl, Francine Josephine, who was abused by her mentally ill birth mother and lived in the dregs of society for the first ten years of her life. She found warmth, kindness, and happiness with her foster mother and birth father, who immediately fell in love and married. Though shut off from beauty and loved so little in her childhood, she grew up to be an empathetic, altruistic, sensitive, forgiving, thoughtful, and compassionate young woman. Such rarities this girl possesses at such a tender age. For these attributes are not often found in ordinary everyday people for they do not appreciate what life has to offer and who take God's gifts for granted. Francine, always believing in the best of all people, always giving them the benefit of the doubt and second chances, always wanting to please everybody and wanting everyone to be happy, is what she happens to be like. Although knowing her parents were estranged from their siblings, it was Francine who brought them together, thus becoming a tight-knit, close, loving family. When she met her paternal grandparents for the first time, she was warm and kind to her grandfather, who was afflicted with dementia and of whom she had no recollection of. As for her grandmother, whom she was named after, she formed a loving and close bond. She is very curious about other people in her parents' lives that she has never met or who have never knew of her existence but nonetheless thinks of them lovingly and as part of herself and her family. But one day, Social Services informed her that her birth mother wants to see her, which she agrees to do, surmising that maybe this woman had been rehabilitated and was remorseful or at least civil, as it was Francine's nature to be understanding. Unfortunately, nothing came about as she had hoped, and for that she suffered from it. But afterward, does Francine regress back into her shell after these past few years of getting to love and trust people, or does she grow up and accept what had happened to her during that one fateful encounter and become the fine young woman that everyone who knows her portrays her to be?
About the Author: Beth Carol Solomon has worked in classified advertising in New York City. She has volunteered her time at the Clove Lakes Nursing Home and at the Silver Lakes Nursing Home for senior citizens, P.S. 16 and WIllowbrook State School for special needs individuals, the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, the Alzheimer's Foundation, and at the Staten Island University Hospital. She has a B.A. in psychology, a B.A. in English, a B.A. in history, a double B.A. in women's studies and sociology, and an M.A. in English. She has graduated with honors, and as magna cum laude and dean's list student. She took adult education classes in bookkeeping, astrology, short-story writing, and computers. She has appeared in several Who's Who publications. She published her first book, Collected Works, which consisted of several personal memoir accounts and two novellas. She had stories and poems published in several anthologies. Her hobbies include reading, writing, country/Western music, meditation, self-help, creative visualization, and family life. She lives in Staten Island, New York.