In the early 1970s, Laura Bauer decides to leave college and head fifty miles north of her comfortable Atlanta home to manage a federally funded project aiding pregnant teenagers from the back roads of Appalachia. Almost as young as her clients, Laura is immediately confronted with—and almost overwhelmed by—a variety of young women in desperate circumstances, having no other source of prenatal care. When Nighttime Shadows Fall, Diane Michael Cantor's second novel, portrays the world of these girls with compassion, hardscrabble humor, and reverence for their families' capacities to prevail despite hardships...