This often painfully funny look at the roles of ex-husbands and ex-wives, paints the stepparents involved in this mess mainly as innocent bystanders, and the book’s title refers to the film Stepmom -a film that’s “a wildly unrealistic and weepy favorite with the second wife set.” This Hollywood image of the stepmother is in direct contrast to the stepparent role portrayed unglamorously in the novel.

The novel spits and crackles with wicked humour while chronicling the petty, nasty dysfunctional relationships between several middle-aged divorced urbanite couples. I’m Not Julia Roberts from author Laura Ruby is a novel of manners written for the bleak realities of the 21st Century. They embark on years-long quests to humiliate each other, alienate their own children, destroy each other’s property or credit rating.' They kidnap pets, set fire to the furniture. Divorcing people have sordid public affairs with best friends and neighbors. Though she too has a defunct marriage under her belt, Roxie herself feels divorced from divorce. So far, it looks as though the effects are madness, aggression, petulance, depression, weight gain, adult acne, plastic surgery, and Jerry Springer logic.

'For her thesis, she plans on researching the effects of divorce on the divorced and divorcing.

Bad apple by laura ruby