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A Novel
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard comes a page-turning family drama that explores the emotional consequences of loyalty, deception and jealousy.
Stunned by her recently widowed father's reckless behavior, a young woman must learn to navigate a new world—where the people she should trust the most have become strangers she cannot trust at all.
Frankie Attleboro returns home to Cape Cod with thrilling news. She's met the love of her life, and they're getting married with a baby on the way. That's the moment her father makes his own jaw-dropping announcement: at sixty, he's getting married as well, to Frankie's best friend, Ariel, who is also pregnant, and due soon.
As Frankie and Ariel struggle to adjust to their new relationship, Ariel's estranged mother, Carlotta, returns after a decade-long absence. She claims to be a changed woman—but is she really? And where has she been all these years? Frankie is suspicious, and as Carlotta's unpredictable behavior intensifies, Frankie must untangle the threads of the past to protect Ariel's future—and her own.
"Mitchard offers an arresting exploration of a family's messy relationships... . The characters and relationships are all smartly drawn, and the narrative is shot through with plenty of humor and scandal." —Publishers Weekly
"An intriguing, twisty-turny tale of family secrets ..." —Kirkus Reviews
"... plenty of fraught family dynamics and tension here to keep the pages turning as the story builds to a gratifying conclusion." —Booklist
"To write about those oldest of subjects—families, their secrets, their betrayals—and make them not only new but revelatory, it takes an absolute master of storytelling. How lucky for all of us that we have Jacquelyn Mitchard on the job! She writes, as always, with empathy, humor, and grace. This book is a scandalous delight."
—Rebecca Makkai, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Believers, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
"From its astonishing opening to the marvelous, improbable vision of its final pages, A Very Inconvenient Scandal delivers one remarkable revelation after another. Readers will eagerly follow the willful and likeable Frankie as she struggles to accept the transformation of family and friends in the period after the death of her beloved mother, Beatrice. A tale of family skeletons, community secrets, and the enduring power of friendship and love, this delightful novel shows that it is possible to recover from and even triumph after loss."
—Lan Samantha Chang, author of The Family Chao
"A Very Inconvenient Scandal is that rare mix of beautiful prose and terrifying suspense. I devoured it."
—Robert Dugoni, New York Times bestselling author of the Terry Crosswhite series
This information about A Very Inconvenient Scandal was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
New York Times bestseller Jacquelyn Mitchard's novels include The Deep End of the Ocean, Twelve Times Blessed, and The Breakdown Lane. She is also the author of The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, a collection of her newspaper columns. She lives with her husband and six children in Madison, Wisconsin.
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