CW: Rape

When the law decides your fate, survival becomes an act of defiance.

After a heart attack lands Alina Rodriguez in a Texas ER, she receives a second, unthinkable diagnosis: a non-viable, life-threatening pregnancy. With doctors unwilling to treat her, the clock ticks, and Ali is forced into a desperate search for care in a system where her life comes second.

But this isn’t Ali’s first impossible dilemma. Decades earlier, as a pregnant teen navigating faith, fear, and family fracture in suburban Chicago, she found quiet allies to help when she couldn’t trust those she loved. Now, as past and present collide, the hidden histories of her grandmother and aunt in pre-revolutionary Cuba simmer to the surface, revealing a legacy of silence, sacrifice, and resilience.

No Perfect Choice is a gripping, deeply human story of autonomy, inheritance, and the price women pay when doctors' hands are tied.

Lilliana Méndez-Soto was born and raised in Chicago, and relocated to Northern California just before the San Andreas earthquake in 1989—but that didn’t scare her away. She is a first generation Cuban-American, and practiced clinical pharmacy in both hospital and home care settings for many years before devoting herself full time to writing. She led writing groups in a health care environment for many years and is trained in the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) method. She writes fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, and believes that if you let the words flow, they will find their form.
She is a proud alum of the Community of Writers Fiction Workshops, a San Francisco Writer’s Grotto Rooted and Written Fellow in Memoir, and a two two-time fellow of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) which nurtures writers of color. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, the Authors Guild, the Queer Sacramento Authors Collective, and the Sacramento Poetry Center. Her writing has appeared in the journal Peregrine, The Caregiving Issue, The Writing Coven Anthology Vol I, and Bi Women Quarterly, and her Substack publication Words From My Heart. No Perfect Choice is her first novel. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found exploring the outdoors with her rescue dogs.