Carolyn Samuels is obsessed with the idea of being popular. She is convinced that the only thing keeping her from happiness is her "too heavy for fashion" body and not being a cheerleader. Hyperventilating when she gets nervous doesn't help. When she is paired for a math project with the girl who tormented her in middle school, Jennifer Taylor, she is sure it is going to be another year of pain. With Carolyn's crush on Jennifer's hunky junior quarterback, Brad, her freshman year in high school looks like a rerun of middle school. When Jennifer is the only student who knows why she fell in gym class, Carolyn is blackmailed into doing her math homework in return for Jennifer's silence. Jennifer takes on Carolyn as a pity project since she can't be seen with someone who dresses in jeans and sweatshirts. When Jennifer invites Carolyn to spend the night to make her over and teach her to tumble, Carolyn learns Jennifer's secret and lies to her own friends to cover it up. Will Carolyn become a cheerleader and popular?

“After” is a story about the struggles Lauren Walstein, a fifteen-year-old girl, has to go through when her father suddenly has a heart attack and undergoes bypass surgery. In one phone call her life changes completely. Her best friend since kindergarten, Joey, is going out with her enemy and they have grown apart. Before the phone call all she thought about was getting a scholarship for softball, and the Mets. Suddenly she must deal with both her father’s illness and being in school. The demands on her from both ends complicate the story. In the middle of all this, she finds she is developing feelings for her best friend that are more than friendly. Is he feeling the same or is he just comforting her? In addition there is Joey’s mean girlfriend Amber, who doesn’t appreciate Lauren being in the picture. Will Lauren’s father recover? How will Lauren cope with her new feelings for Joey?

Follow the journey of a marriage and a life lived full of love, laughter and pain, joy, and the depths of sorrow. Explore the tiny facets that exist when you are together and the agony of suddenly finding yourself all alone.

Barbara Ehrentreu, a prolific writer in her own right, takes the reader on a poetic/nostalgic journey that will move you to tears as she gives us glimpses of her gifts in life, and the profound loss where she discovered hope peeking through the rainbow of acceptance.

Along the journey you will both laugh and cry as you read of her life before and after she lost Hal, her husband of forty-eight years.