MIAMI – Radisson hotels are getting a $1.5 billion luxury rebranding and facelift in the U.S., owner Carlson Hotels Worldwide announced Wednesday, even as the industry struggles with crushing debt and plummeting revenue.

Radisson, forever underperforming in the U.S., will be remade into a more stylish and contemporary brand here, with distinctive architecture and flair, President and CEO Hubert Joly announced at a conference in Kissimmee, Fla.

And Carlson will increase its 1,000-hotel portfolio by more than 50 percent, including new luxury Regent hotels, mid-scale Country Inns & Suites and Park Inns.

New Radisson amenities will include 3-hour express laundry, turndown service, upgraded bathrooms and free daily newspapers; all the brands already offer free Wi-Fi.

Joly said he intends to split the expansions equally among the brands — except Regent, which will remain small — and roughly one-third will be in the United States, one-third in India and one-third in other parts of Asia.

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“Secret Daughter” (William Morrow, 352 pages, $23.99), by Shilpi Somaya Gowda: Sometimes the image in our minds of what we have lost is far greater than the loss itself, and so it is for Asha, who was given up for adoption by her birthparents in India.

Boys are the prized possession in the Indian village where Kavita Merchant gives birth to a daughter. She loves this child and cannot bear to have her husband, Jasu, leave her to die, as he did with their first girl. In secret, she names her Usha, or dawn, and painstakingly makes her way from her village to then-Bombay when the baby is just days old. She leaves the child at an orphanage, and every day for the rest of her life, she lives with the pain of her decision. But for Kavita, it was the only way to save the girl.

The child is renamed Asha, meaning hope, and adopted by a couple — an Indian man and his American wife — who live in California. Krishnan and Somer Thakkar are both doctors. Slowly, Somer begins to realize what it means to be a mother, about the small and large sacrifices. But her child doesn’t look like her, and Somer worries that she will one day lose Asha to her native land. The relationship between the couple begins to unravel as Somer refuses to accept the Indian culture, rarely visiting her husband’s family. This also strains her relationship with Asha.

Kavita, on the other hand, gives birth to a son, Vijay, and is thus able to keep him. Jasu persuades her to move to Mumbai, where they can try to pursue a better life. But they are met instead by the squalor of the Dharavi slums.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s flair for detail is evident in the way she describes the clothes, food, the streets and their smells of this land teeming with people and poverty in “Secret Daughter.” This story about motherhood, loss, family and forgiveness is authentic in every way. The reader need not be a mother to feel Kavita’s pain. The prose is so achingly touching, it draws the reader in with every description and emotion of the characters.

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LOS ANGELES – There wasn’t a bottle of Oxiclean or a ShamWow anywhere. But there was Dawn Stephens’ nifty new, all-in-one toilet-bowl-cleaning brush.

“We don’t have to look for the cleaning liquid and the brush. The cleaning liquid is right inside the brush!” the chirpy, singsongy Stephens shouted in delight as she pitched her invention Wednesday to a panel of judges that included infomercial king AJ Khubani.

Khubani, founder of the Telebrands “As Seen on TV” products company, has made a fortune hawking products like the Ped Egg (to trim calluses off your feet) and has spent the better part of three decades looking for the next hot thing to sell to insomniacs hooked on late-night TV.

But in this era of endless reality TV and get-rich-and-famous-quick schemes, Khubani is changing his entrepreneurial approach. Instead of trotting the globe looking for the next Thighmaster or inviting inventors to his New Jersey headquarters to show him a next-generation Clapper that he can sell for a cut of the profits, he’s assembled an “American Idol“-like panel of judges and taken them on the road.

The group plans stops at several other, still-to-be-determined cities, and it is unclear how many inventors they will pick to promote. There is no reality show yet, but television cameras are filming — in case Khubani strikes a television deal.

Khubani’s first stop was Los Angeles, where Stephens found herself with nearly three dozen other inventors from around the country, each waiting for five minutes to make their pitch to Khubani and his fellow judges, who included his wife, Poonam.

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