EXPOSURE

In EXPOSURE, Therese Fowler has written her most gripping novel to date—a ripped-from-the-headlines story of intense young love and a nightmarish legal maelstrom that threatens to destroy two families.

Amelia Wilkes’ strict father does not allow her to date, but that doesn’t stop the talented, winsome high school senior from carrying on a secret romance with her classmate, Anthony Winter. Desperately in love, the two envision a life together and plan to tell Amelia’s parents when she turns eighteen and is legally an adult. Anthony’s mother, Kim Winter, who teaches at their school, knows—and keeps—their secret.  But the couple’s passion is exposed sooner than planned: Amelia’s father, Harlan, is shocked and infuriated to find naked pictures of Anthony on his daughter’s computer. Just hours later, Anthony is arrested.

Despite Amelia’s frantic protests, Harlan uses his wealth and influence with local law enforcement and the media to label Anthony a deviant who preyed on his innocent daughter. Spearheaded by a zealous prosecutor anxious to turn the case into a public crusade against “sexting,” the investigation soon takes an even more disturbing and destructive turn.

As events spiral wildly out of control and the scandalous story makes national news, Amelia and Anthony risk everything in a bold and dangerous plan to clear their names and end the madness once and for all.

A captivating page-turner, Therese Fowler’s EXPOSURE is also a deftly crafted, provocative, and timely novel that serves as a haunting allegory of the consequences of love in the modern age.

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Recommended by the NEW YORK TIMES and FAMILY CIRCLE magazine!

Read the USA TODAY feature story.

Now a Book Club selection for these national book clubs:

• SITS Girls #SITSBooks (July ‘11)
• Pulpwood Queen Book Club (of Beauty and the Book) fall ‘11; date to come
• Manic Mommies Book Club (September ‘11)

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Selected by The Book Maven as a Mother’s Day Pick for New York One (NY1)

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Featured in the Raleigh News & Observer, and the Charlotte Observer

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Reviews:

This book packs in a lot–several different versions of parental dilemmas, teenage love, lust, social media, cell phone cameras and texting, the law, and more. Much more. It’s about society changing faster than the laws that bind it do, faster than most parents and school counselors can keep up with. It’s about broad definitions and narrow minds. It’s about what we want for ourselves, and what we want for our children. It’s about what we expect of ourselves, and what our family expects of us. It’s about brilliance and stupidity.

But that’s all simmering below the surface. The basic story is a about a teenage boy and a teenage girl who have fallen in love. They make a simple decision, a private decision, that gets exposed to the public in a damaging, life destroying way. This is a riveting story, made more so when you know that the author went through a similar situation in her own life with her teenage son. She is brave in writing it, and I believe that the reader will be richer for the reading of it. This is going to be a HUGE book for bookclubs–there is so much to talk about within it’s covers. Fans of Jodi Picoult will embrace it completely. Fans of Therese Fowler will be blown away by how far she has come in her writing and in her grip upon her reader. This is a story no one will forget. ~Jackie Blem, Tattered Cover Book Store

A story of desperate young love, complicated families, and a legal system gone awry, Therese Fowler’s Exposure is provocative, timely, and compelling.  Amelia and Anthony’s story will surely strike fear into the heart of every parent, and leave book clubs talking for hours. ~Meg Waite Clayton, national bestselling author of The Wednesday Sisters and The Four Ms. Bradwells

Headlines rarely reveal the truth. Exposure does.  This nail-biting story of families caught in a collision of teen romance, the age of instant disclosure, an over-zealous prosecutor, and the media, provides an incisive stay-awake-till-you-finish exploration of hot-button issues.  I truly couldn’t put it down. ~Randy Susan Meyers, author of The Murderer’s Daughters

Complex, gripping, and rich with emotion, Fowler’s 21st-century Romeo and Juliet beautifully blends ripped-from-the-headlines drama with honest and carefully drawn examinations of family, loyalty, honesty, and the power of love. ~ Eleanor Brown, New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters

Fowler fans—and I am definitely one— know to expect great writing, fully realized characters, complex moral dilemmas, and deep emotional connections to come together in a page-turning story you can’t wait to pass on to your book club or your best friend Here Fowler brings the full force of her talent to bear on a gorgeous, heartrending story of young love and thwarted parental ambitions. Don’t miss this one! ~Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Backseat Saints

EXCERPT

ONE

Nine hours before the police arrived, Anthony Winter stood, barefooted and wild, on the narrow front porch of the house he shared with his mother. The painted wooden planks were damp and cool beneath his feet, but he hardly noticed. In his right hand he held a fallen maple leaf up to a sun that was just breaking the horizon. In his left he held his phone. He squinted at the leaf, marveling at its deep blood-orange color, amazed and happy that nature could make such a thing from what had, only a few weeks earlier, been emerald green, and before that, deep lime, and before that, a tight, tiny bundle of a bud on a spindly limb, waving in a North Carolina spring breeze. He’d always been an observant person; he hadn’t always been so romantic. It was Amelia. She brought it out in him. She brought it out in everybody.

Amelia’s voice, when she answered his call, was lazy with sleep. It was a Monday, her day to sleep a little later than she could the rest of the week. Tuesday through Friday, she rose at five to get homework done before her three-mile run, which came before the 8:50 start of their Ravenswood Academy school day. At 3:00 pm was dance—ballet, modern, jazz—then voice lessons twice a week at five; often there was some play’s rehearsal after that, and then, if her eyelids weren’t drooping like the dingy shades in her voice teacher’s living room, she might start on her homework. But more often she would sneak out of her astonishing house to spend a stolen hour with him. With Anthony. The man (she loved to call him that, now that he’d turned eighteen) with whom she intended to spend all of her future life, and then, if God was good to them, eternity to follow.

Seeing Amelia and Anthony together, you would never have guessed they were destined for anything other than a charmed future, and possibly greatness. Perhaps Amelia had, as her father was fond of saying, emerged from the womb coated in stardust. And maybe it was also true what Anthony’s mother claimed: that her son had been first prize in the Cosmic lottery, and she’d won. They were, separately, well-tended and adored. Together, they were a small but powerful force of nature. Love makes that of people, sometimes.

That morning, nine hours and perhaps five minutes before his arrest, Anthony stood on the narrow front porch with a leaf and a phone in his chilly hands. Amelia was saying, “I dreamt of us,” in a suggestive voice that stirred him, inside and out. He heard his mother coming downstairs, so he pulled the front door closed. Unlike the rest of his school’s faculty, she knew about Amelia and him; in her way, she approved. Still, he preferred to keep his conversations private. There were certain things even an approving mother wouldn’t want to hear. Certain things he absolutely did not want her to know.