Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The Local News
Miriam Gershow

The Local News is such a good book that I want you all to go out and read it, right now. No, seriously. Go. I'll wait.

....

OK, you're back. Didn't want to shell out the $24.95 for the hardcover? It's understandable; I wouldn't have bought this book unless I hadn't had a nice windfall in a Halloween card from my mom. (BTW, Ma, we should make this a tradition.) But don't fear: I'm here to tell you all about this book, so that by the time it comes out in paperback you won't be able to resist it.

Danny Pasternak disappears one August afternoon in 1996, while jogging home from football practice at the start of his senior year of high school. It is a huge blow to the town of Fairfield, Michigan--Danny's a star football player, the most popular guy in school. The entire town turns itself inside out looking for him, his jock friends erect a memorial in his honor in the school corridor, the local news every night features stories about his disappearance.

By the time the story opens, Danny is gone, and so we learn about him through the eyes of his younger sister, Lydia, who is Danny's antithesis in everyway: smart, while Danny had a learning disability, quiet while Danny was loud, shocking, crushingly unpopular while Danny was homecoming king. While Danny's parents fade and waste away in the absence of their golden boy, Lydia begins to glow. She's suddenly popular, at the center of this tragedy, and Danny's friends, who used to tease her and bully her, are her champions, now. Lydia begins to settle into her skin in a way that she couldn't when Danny was around, to bully her. Is it so wrong that she should take advantage of his absence, to feel a little relief? And Danny will be found, soon, safe, and things will be different then, right?

As the months pass, and Danny remains missing, Lydia begins to think that perhaps she was wrong. This popularity that she finds at first so disgusting, and then so enthralling, she now finds weird and perverted. Her new friends don't like her. And her parents, who so obviously favored Danny when he was around, favor him even more now that he's missing. And, Lydia begins to think, perhaps there is the chance that Danny won't be coming back.

If Jodi Picoult had written this book, it would be like a Hallmark card version of this story, where people go around saying things like I felt the wings of your soul beating inside my soul and This is how we learn to breathe, by tasting the air. God bless her heart. I love Jodi Picoult. I'd cry buckets over that story, if she wrote it. But Gershow's way is better. It's like if John Hughes had ever made a movie about a boy's disappearance, starring Molly Ringwald as his sister (a smarter Molly Ringwald). I don't know if it's because *I* was in my sophomore year in 1996 (old!) or because I, like Lydia, was depressingly unpopular, but I really related to her. Gershow really captures what it's like to be that age: like wading out into the water, farther and farther, testing our independence, and by the time you realize you've gone too far it's too late to turn back. We spend a lot of time in Lydia's head, and every bit of it is perfect: the way she can simultaneously scorn and appeal to people, the way she constructs vivid imaginary worlds, the way she plans out what she will say, and in what tone, and how she'll look when she says it.

The one bad thing of this book is that it is ruined by a shitty epilogue. Why do people persist in putting epilogues in books?

ep⋅i⋅logue /ˈɛpəˌlɔg, -ˌlɒg/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ep-uh-lawg, -log] –noun

An epilogue, or epilog, is a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature or drama, usually used to bring closure to the work.

"To bring closure to the work." It seems like everybody is jumping on the epilogue train and they shouldn't be. Sometimes, a book needs that closure, but most of the time, it's just distracting. You jump ahead ten years and all of a sudden this person you knew is a stranger to you. And in this case, an epilogue is completely unnecessary. It adds nothing, and also I really feel that sometimes a story can't be thematically tied up in a nice neat bow, or shouldn't be. A story about a rift like this, in a family--can you ever really have closure for something like that? My MFA-candidate husband told me once about a growing trend of writers not trusting their readers to make the right conclusions about where the characters go at the end of the story, and this feels like that. DAMN YOU, GERSHOW! I AM SMART ENOUGH TO DO THIS ON MY OWN! I PROMISE!

And it's a double pity, because the last line of this book is so incredibly beautiful that it should have stopped there, with one brief word winging it's way up and up. If it had, I would have given it five stars.

But as it is:

Rating: 4 of 5 stars.

(PS: I'm thinking about doing a giveaway for this book. I haven't ever done a giveaway before, and I don't know if you guys are interested in things like that or how to go about doing it. What do you think? Would you be interested in something like that?)