title: Beautiful Flower
author: Reynolds, A.L.
description: Life has gotten a bit boring for Zuria Johnston, and with the exception of her Friday nights out with her best, flamboyant friend, Chase, and her job as a guidance counselor, she seems to have hit a rut. After a rough break-up with her longtime boyfriend, Manuel, her prospects of finding a man also seem pretty bleak. That is, until she connects with her poetic crush, Amir, and he opens her eyes to a world of romance and passion that she didn’t know existed. She discovers what it feels like to be loved as a real woman should, and to overcome the difficulties of being a young, strong, black woman who is afraid to have her heart broken for a second time. The thrill of new romance seems to fill the emptiness in her life, but her old life isn’t as easy to escape as she first thought. Mistakes that she thought she had left behind threaten to undo everything that she has begun to build in this new chapter of her life, but she isn’t the only one battling the demons of her past. The poetic and passionate Amir harbors some dark secrets of his own, and when the truth begins to come out, the connection between her two lovers, old and new, may end her short reign of happiness before it ever fully begun. With love from one man and sworn vengeance from another, Zuria is trapped in the middle, trying desperately to make her way through the tangled troubles of family, love, and happiness. The problem is, she might lose more than the man of her dreams. As this complex and spellbinding story reaches its peak, Zuria will have to risk mind, body, and soul for herself and the people she loves, but will that final risk mean achieving the life she'd always dreamed of? Or will she end up making the ultimate sacrifice?