The Local News (MMBC4)

Announcing our fourth book club selection - a special thank you to Random House (Spiegel & Grau) for donating books to our book group!

Please send me an email with ‘The Local News’ in the subject line and include your address in the body of the email if you are interested in participating. Random House is donating 24 books to us, sign up fast!

Feb 24 update: I have sent the list of recipients to Random House. Be on the look out for your book!

I encourage everyone to participate, even if you are not lucky enough to receive a free copy, we should have a great discussion.

This book will be released Feb 24th, our discussion will begin late May/early June.

The Local News by Miriam Gershow (368 pages)

Synopsis (from Author’s site):

"Going missing was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done."

Even a decade later, the memories of the year Lydia Pasternak turned sixteen continue to haunt her. As a teenager, Lydia lived in her older brother's shadow. While Danny's athletic skills and good looks established his place with the popular set at school, Lydia's smarts relegated her to the sidelines, where she rolled her eyes at her brother and his meathead friends and suffered his casual cruelty with resigned bewilderment. Though a part of her secretly wished for a return of the easy friendship she and Danny shared as children, another part of her wished Danny would just vanish. And then, one night, he did.

In the year following Danny Pasternak's disappearance, his parents go off the rails, his town buzzes with self-indulgent mourning, and his little sister Lydia finds herself thrust into unwanted celebrity, forced to negotiate her ambivalent--often grudging--grief for a brother she did not particularly like. Suddenly embraced by Danny's old crowd, forgotten by her parents, and drawn into the missing person investigation by her family's intriguing private eye, Lydia both blossoms and struggles to find herself during Danny's absence. But when a trail of clues leads to a shocking outcome in her brother's case, the teenaged Lydia and the adult she will become are irrevocably changed, even now as she reluctantly prepares to return to her hometown.

Relentlessly gripping, often funny, and profoundly moving, The Local News is a powerful exploration of the fraught relationship between a brother and sister and how our siblings define who we are.