Veteran teacher Kathryn Shay knows teenagers and puts that knowledge into creating a series about successful women who were once troubled teens.

Welcome to SERENITY HOUSE, a trilogy of stories about women who spent some of their adolescent years in a group home for troubled girls. Each story explores what effects their dysfunctional backgrounds had on them. As you might guess, trust—not being able to trust—is a big issue for all three. But with the help of those who love them, each woman overcomes her difficult beginnings and becomes the person she was meant to be.

In PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, Paige Kendrick is a successful doctor who keeps people at a distance and refuses a relationship with hunky doctor Ian Chandler. But Ian won’t stop until he gets what he wants—Paige! And because of his assertiveness, he almost destroys their chances of a life together.

In A PLACE TO BELONG, Darcy O’Malley and Hunter Sloan have more in common than they know when they meet at her daycare. Both have troubled kids, both grew up as outcasts in their hometown, and both find a deep and driving passion for the other that cannot be denied.

When she was eighteen, troubled Anabelle Crane fell in love with Nathan Hyde, the town’s fair-haired boy. He broke her heart and she left town to become an undercover cop. In AGAINST THE ODDS, she’s back to guard him from a stalker. But some things haven’t changed and Anabelle and Nathan find that the passion they have for each other has not died!

From the reviewers:

“For readers like myself who have been a bit disappointed with the quality of the genre of late, Shay’s latest might as well have antidote stamped right next to the Serenity House logo.” – The Romance Reader

Fans will enjoy the return of the Serenity House residents, and can only hope for a second-generation series one day! – Word Weaving

Visit Amazon’s Kathryn Shay Page

Kathryn Shay is a lifelong writer. At fifteen, she penned her first ‘romance,’ a short story about a female newspaper reporter in New York City and her fight to make a name for herself in a world of male journalists – and with one hardheaded editor in particular. Looking back, Kathryn says she should have known then that writing was in her future. But as so often happens, fate sent her detouring down another path.

Fully intending to pursue her dream of big city lights and success in the literary world, Kathryn took every creative writing class available at the small private women’s college she attended in upstate New York. Instead, other dreams took precedence. She met and subsequently married a wonderful guy who’d attended a neighboring school, then completed her practice teaching, a requirement for the education degree she never intended to use. But says Kathryn, “I fell in love with teaching the first day I was up in front of a class, and knew I was meant to do that.”

Kathryn went on to build a successful career in the New York state school system, thoroughly enjoying her work with adolescents. But by the early 1990s, she’d again made room in her life for writing. It was then that she submitted her first manuscript to publishers and agents. Despite enduring two years of rejections, she persevered. And on a snowy December afternoon in 1994, Kathryn Shay sold her first book to Harlequin Superromance.

Since that first sale, Kathryn has written twenty-two books for Harlequin, ten mainstream contemporary romances for the Berkley Publishing Group, and two online novellas, which Berkley then published in traditional print format.

Kathryn has become known for her powerful characterizations – readers say they feel they know the people in her books – and her heart-wrenching, emotional writing (her favorite comments are that fans cried while reading her books or stayed up late to finish them). In testament to her skill, the author has had a one of her books serialized in the December 2003 COSMOPOLITAN magazine and has been quoted in PEOPLE and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. She has won five RT BookClub Magazine Reviewers Choice Awards, three Holt Medallions, two Desert Quill Awards, the Golden Leaf Award, and several online accolades.

Even in light of her writing success, that initial love of teaching never wavered for Kathryn. She finished out her teaching career in 2004, retiring from the same school where her career began. These days, she lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children. “My life is very full,” she reports, “but very happy. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to pursue and achieve my dreams.”