When Jason, her two-year-old son, starts having asthma-like attacks, Rosie rushes him to the ER, where the attending physician suggests she consult Dr.

She doesn't do so here, though, until it's almost too late. Rosie, who dropped out of her pre-med studies to marry Quinn (thus bitterly disappointing her father), learned enough medicine so that she can sometimes ask the right question. Rosie Sloan, a doctor's daughter, and her estranged husband Quinn, a policeman, never come into full focus as they trade clich‚s, emote, and gradually begin to understand what is going on. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections TV rights optioned by Citadel Entertainment.Auerbach (Sleep, Baby, Sleep, 1994, etc.) turns a current tabloid and talk-show preoccupation into a slow-starting but ultimately gripping tale of a mother who, accused of child abuse, is forced to confront not only the judicial but the medical system as well. The highwire-walking plot eventually falls off line, but Auerbach's urgent prose keeps the entertainment from flagging even then. Throughout, readers are treated to an intricate and intriguing tour of family law at its most unjust and, when Rosie puts all the pieces together, to a paranoid scenario worthy of Oliver Stone. Rosie's ER paramour, meanwhile, seems unconcerned about Jason's deteriorating health. During the proceedings, the court takes Jason away from Rosie, forbidding all contact, placing the child first with Quinn and then in a foster family after Quinn allows Rosie to see the boy. A smug social worker inexplicably agrees that the charge is warranted, and so Rosie must go to court, all the while wondering whether Quinn or Diana, or both, instigated her troubles.

The plot thickens when someone-whose identity is shielded by law-makes a claim to the Department of Children and Families that Rosie neglects Jason. But Quinn has a new, young girlfriend, Diana, while Rosie is dating the ER doctor who treats Jason. The diagnosis of their son, Jason, as an asthmatic and the attacks that send him to the local ER have recently brought the couple back into each other's lives. Here, it's charges of child neglect and abuse, not of kidnapping, that face Rosie Sloan, who's separated from her husband, police officer Quinn. In a premise similar to that of her last novel, Sleep, Baby, Sleep, a mother plunged into dire legal trouble over her alleged mistreatment of her young child is at the center of Auerbach's harrowing new one.

Catch Your Breath by Jessica Auerbach