We who have worked for a long, long (ok, very long) time here at The Journal News were pleasantly surprised recently to receive a package with a new novel written by an former colleague.

It’s called Pieces of Happily Ever After, and it’s written by Irene Zutell, who once covered the police beat and the usual community stuff in Scarsdale, Eastchester and Tuckahoe.

A Bronx native, Irene grew up in Eastchester.

(On the back cover, it gives a little bio on Irene: “She has written for People, Us Weekly, The New York Times, the New York Daily News, Newsday and others.” That’s us, The Journal News there in that “others.” Way cool, huh?)

To be fair, more->I can’t write a review of the novel because I was friends with Irene when she was here, in the late 1980s to 1991. Everyone still here who knew Irene remembers her fondly. But if I can’t give an objective review, I can still make some observations:

One thing about novels written by reporters — they’re often quick reads, and Irene’s 296-pager is no exception. I traded a few e-mails after we received it, and as we reminisced, Irene recalled that it was our columnist Phil Reisman, then a local editor, who had taught her the importance of grabbing readers from the start.

You can see that in her story. It starts off with a woman holed up in her own home with the paparazzi on her lawn because her husband has left her for a movie star. She hasn’t gone out for days and her young daughter, Gabby, is beginning to rebel.

Gabby is a lively kid, and the most vivid character in the book. Irene told me a bunch of publishers turned down the book because they didn’t feel that she could write dialogue that sounded like a 5-year-old. Which is funny, because Irene cribbed the kid’s lines from her own daughter’s speech. She even kept notes.

(She makes reference to this in the acknowledgments. As a fairly new fiction writer — this is her second novel — Irene uses the acknowledgments section to thank a group of people larger than the populations of some South Pacific islands. But she ends the section with “a special mention — or perhaps apology — to Olivia, whose expressions and insights I stole.”)

Irene tells me the novel’s plot comes from a real-life experience. She lived near the Moders when Danny Moder left his wife for Julia Roberts, a movie star of some note. Irene, then working for People, tried to get an exclusive from Moder’s ex for a magazine article. Unable to do that, she turned the scenario into a novel.

Well, that may have been the genesis of the idea. But the heart of the book is in the narrator, Alice, trying to deal with her daughter’s reactions to her father leaving and her mother’s new troubles.

Here’s one scene between Alice and Gabby:

I looked hard at her. “I mean, are you okay with Daddy not being here all the time?”

“Sure.” She eyed me suspiciously.

“Really?”

“Sure, why not? It’s nice and quiet here.”

“Oh, Daddy was too noisy?”

“No, you were. You were always yelling at Daddy.”

“I was not.”

“Yes you were. And then he’d yell back. Then you’d yell. Then he’d yell. It was loud. It really damaged my cochlea.”

Cochlea. I had read Gabby a book on her body. I explained to her that when she screamed, she could damage her cochlea, or inner ear. Now she was using it against me.

“I don’t think I yelled that much at Daddy.”

“Okay, Mommy, I could be wrong,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Actually, Olivia was younger than Gabby when she began uttering the lines that would help her mother write a book.

“Olivia was seriously still three — nearly four — when I read her Cinderella and after I finished, she was angry,” Irene wrote to me when we exchanged e-mails about the novel. “She told me that story didn’t work because if everything was supposed to go back to normal at midnight, the shoe should  too. I knew I was in trouble then. And I also knew I’d have to write about it. This book gave me the opportunity to use all the stuff Olivia said.”

So now you have a taste of the book and a glimpse at where it came from. If you want to learn more about it, visit Irene’s Web site here.