You Have Chosen

You Have Chosen is a novel by Denise Robins, published in 1950. Its central character, Toni Kenyon, is young and pretty and passionately fond of all that life has to offer.

At the point the book begins, life seems to be offering her very little. Her best friend, Helena, has become engaged to Nicholas Brendon, the most wonderful man Toni has ever met, and Toni has to watch the engagement happen.

What makes it unbearable is what she knows about it: Helena is marrying him for his money rather than for love. Toni cannot say so, and the situation is one that can only be worked through by much misery and unhappiness. The price she pays for keeping quiet is the subject of the book, and it is a price she pays slowly.

The title belongs to the choice Toni makes rather than to anything done to her, and the novel is about a young woman watching a friend make a decision she believes to be wrong while having no standing to stop it.