Secondhand Sister

Overview: Mary-Esther Sloat is a woman with a patchwork past—three failed marriages, misspent youth, and a series of dead-end jobs. When she attempts to donate a kidney to her dying mother, she learns a life-altering truth: Loretta Boudreau Day is not her biological mother. After Loretta dies, Hurricane Katrina destroys Mary-Esther’s only tie to New Orleans—her beloved Nana’s house. For a while, Mary-Esther lives in a battered Chevy van. Armed with a faded birth certificate, she finally corrals the courage to unravel the mystery of her birth at a small hospital in the panhandle of Florida.