You can’t control your parents.

If you didn’t have that figured out when you were five years old, or sixteen, you surely know it now. You can’t tell them what to do. You can’t make them follow your directions. You can’t even give them advice. And as in the new book “A Very Inconvenient Scandal” by Jacqueline Mitchard, they’d say the same thing about you.

Frankie Attleboro wasn’t just angry. She was livid.

She’d planned on telling her father, Mack, and her brother, Penn, the good news later. Her fiancé, Gil, should’ve been the first to know that Frankie was due to have a baby shortly after their fall wedding but somehow, her news got revealed, twisted, and lost in the midst of her father’s urgent text and his selfishness.

Hurrying home to Cape Cod, Frankie feared the worst — and she found it: rushing to her father’s house, she found him in bed with her former best friend, Ariel Puck, who was very pregnant. Never mind that Frankie’s mother had been dead barely a year. Never mind that Mack was old enough to be Ariel’s father. Never mind Frankie’s news, which was forgotten as Mack and Ariel made plans for their own wedding the following weekend.

Frankie couldn’t get over her feelings of betrayal. Her mother had practically raised Ariel after Ariel’s mother abandoned her, and Frankie had supported her new mother-in-law for all of high school. All for this? She was angry, hurt, and yes, jealous.

Despite that Frankie hated to see it, the wedding of the new Mr. and Mrs. Mack Attleboro went off without a hitch – almost. But then a surprise guest showed up at the reception and what was she doing there? Everyone gasped. Everyone gaped. Half the guests didn’t recognize her but indeed, in all her splendor stood Carlotta Puck, gone for a decade, presumed dead, but very much alive…

Let’s start here: there’s a lot of mean-girling going on in “A Very Inconvenient Scandal” and you may have to fight not to roll your eyes or ask the main characters — two young women, both mothers-to-be — if they would please just grow up. Mean-girling leads to drama, the kind you sigh over, and when you think the whole kettle is full to the brim with it, author Jacqueline Mitchard tosses another person into the soup.

Curiously, happily, this character makes all the difference in the world, in that she takes the focus off the tiresome adolescent activity and inserts the kind of nastiness a reader can really sink her teeth into. The character is twisty and cunning but not entirely hate-able; in fact, you may adore her just because she’s so bad. That, plus Mitchard’s propensity toward multiple clever turns-of-phrase on each page turns an immature temper-tantrum story into a pretty good tale of villainy.

If you’re not already a Mitchard fan, this probably isn’t the book to begin with. If you are, though, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. Grab “A Very inconvenient Scandal” and lose control of your time.

“A Very Inconvenient Scandal” by Jacqueline Mitchard
c.2023, Mira
$30.00
336 pages