BUT WHEN SHE WAS BAD...

A debut about fathers and children that should be affecting but, instead, is a breezy tale of a good guy outwitting a nasty, scheming woman who wants to keep everything for herself, including his son.

While he takes a DNA test and waits for the results that will prove whether he’s the father of four-year old Todd, narrator Gil Wexler recalls how he met, married, and then divorced Annie White. Gil, a photographer, was a 30-ish widower with three children—Allegra, Jack, and Wolfie—when a friend introduced him to Annie. Annie was recently separated, but after her divorce, as the new relationship intensified, soon moved into the house. At first the children liked her; then they began to resent her bossiness. When she became pregnant, though, Gil went ahead and married her anyway. Annie miscarried on their wedding day; then, determined to have a baby, was soon pregnant with Todd. After Todd’s birth, Annie, once seemingly sweet and giving, became moody, manipulative, and grasping. She insisted that Gil buy her a condo, where she and Todd could live apart from him and the other children. But when Annie claimed he demeaned her sexually and was suffocating her, Gil, by now tired of her demands and moods, decided he had no option but to divorce her. Which he does at some financial cost, but now, as Annie tries to prevent Gil seeing Todd, a sweet-natured boy whom he loves very much, Gil decides to fight back. And with the assistance of an unlikely lawyer, the grossly overweight Mormon F. Applebee, and with some extremely damning entries in an old journal kept by son Wolfie, Gil is ready to challenge Annie for the sake of Todd.

Lively and well-written, but not persuasive: Annie’s too obviously bad to be credible as a truly wicked woman.