It’s the ultimate bromide in cliché-dom — and one of the truest in literature as in life: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Women on the Move is excited to open its fall season by welcoming two of America’s most engaging Jewish authors whose new books explore that motif: What happens when women’s expectations are thwarted?

For Friedland, those women are four of the high school girls who everyone knows are going places. Yet when they reunite at their dreaded 25th reunion, they confront the stark truth of their disappointed aspirations — and make a pact to push through midlife angst and regain their momentum.

In Rosen’s A Shoe Story, dreams shatter when a small-town girl’s plan to move to New York City, work in a fancy art gallery and live with loving college boyfriend are foiled after her father is injured in a car accident. Seven years later, after a mysterious stranger offers her a second chance at the life she’d imagined, she must decide whether that life still fits.

Trained as a lawyer, Elyssa Friedland gave up the courtroom for writing and is now the author of five novels and a forthcoming picture book. She also teaches novel writing at Yale.

Jane Rosen is an author and screenwriter whose critically acclaimed first novel, Nine Women, One Dress, has been translated into ten languages.