"There was just something about Carlotta," thinks Frankie Attleboro, from whose perspective Jacquelyn Mitchard's A Very Inconvenient Scandal is told. Actually, in this suspense story nestled in a baroque family drama, Carlotta is just one of several well-woven characters--the impetuous Frankie among them--capable of curious behavior.
The novel begins with a summer summons to Cape Cod: one year a widower, Frankie's marine conservationist father announces that in a few days he'll be marrying Frankie's childhood best friend, Ariel, who is having his baby. Frankie, a documentary photographer, is undone--by the surprise, by the queasy-making age gap, by the disregard for her late mother's memory. So much for her own news: like Ariel, Frankie is pregnant and engaged. Into the meshugaas steps Carlotta Puck, who left the Cape more than a decade earlier, when her daughter, Ariel, was a teenager. As Carlotta insinuates herself into her daughter's new family, Frankie reflects on her own mother's suspicions about Carlotta even before the woman abandoned Ariel.
Readers who pick up A Very Inconvenient Scandal for the suspense promised by a novel written by Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean; The Good Son) should be patient: the book is front-loaded with Frankie's story--she nurses her wounds, gives birth, considers professional opportunities. The novel is about how making peace with the present requires making peace with the past; as Frankie sees it, "Carlotta's return had dug up old histories, and a shipwreck that had lain undiscovered for centuries was still a shipwreck." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer