Teenager Lydia Pasternak is torn. Her parents ignore her so she can stay out late and drive without a driver's license. The popular kids at school are starting to pay attention to her. She's getting invited to parties and the dance team captain wants to be-friend her. But in this case, popularity has its price. Lydia's older brother is missing. Lydia's mother is organizing searches and the football players wear black bands on their jerseys. Lydia is torn. She's trying to help find her brother, but a little voice in the back of her head wonders if she's glad he's missing. After all, he bullied and teased her. His friends called her flat-chested and hazed her in the hallways when Danny was present. But now that he's missing, everything has changed.

In a quiet way, this adult novel tells a sad tale. What happened to Danny? What will happen to Lydia? Her parents? The private investigator? I had to read this in two sittings to find out. ( )

The Local News is the story of 15-year-old Lydia Pasternak whose older brother Danny has disappeared. While Danny was athletic and popular (and not particularly bright), Lydia is smart and most definitely not popular, at least not until Danny disappears. I started this book with some trepidation: for one thing, I was feeling a bit tired of the “missing person” plot; for another, I had read Tara’s review at Books and Cooks, which she concluded by saying: “So, The Local News was not really for me, but if you’re interested in the story it’s certainly well done.” Although I wasn’t that interested in the setup, in the end I’m very glad I read the book because it’s less about Danny’s disappearance than it is about Lydia’s experience of high school.

More specifically, Gershow perfectly captures the crazy changeable nature of high school where it is possible, from one day to the next, to go from superfreak to member of the in-crowd and where friendships are sometime dictated more by circumstance and proximity than by shared interests or genuine connection. Only very occasionally did I feel like Gershow missed the mark, as, for example, when Lydia has this thought: “This grandiose treatment, the stuff of only the most ambitious and helpful of suicide ideations, only elevated the situation to the realm of [the] surreal”* (p. 272). Although this was presumably supposed to be the thought of adult rather than teenage Lydia, the language used completely pulled me out of this fairly intense moment.

Now here’s the weird part. I read the end of this book in a teashop. A song came on that made me jump up and ask the waitress what it was. It turned out she’d started playing the soundtrack to the movie Le peuple migrateur (Winged Migration in English)—and so the whole soundtrack played in the background as I finished the book. As I listened and read, I had the weirdest sensation, as if a space had opened up in my chest from throat to heart. And I felt like I knew Lydia from the inside out: I became her. I recently read an interview with poet Peter Levitt, who said: “There is no experience of ‘writer’ and ‘writing’ as distinct or separate entities, no subject and object. That duality collapses and there is just the activity itself.” Something similar happened to me in that teashop: there was no me separate from the story I was reading. In a guest post at Everyday I Write the Book, Gershow said, “Over and over, I try to write my way back into that experience [of high school] and out the other side of it.” For the me that briefly became Lydia, I think she succeeded.

*Note that this quote comes from an ARC and therefore may have been changed for final printing.

A slightly different version of this review can be found on my blog, she reads and reads. ( )

Lydia Pasternak is fifteen years old when her brother Danny, a popular high school athlete, disappears. First he is there and then he is gone, leaving behind parents who are stunned into a drifting existence centered around finding their son and Lydia, whose ambivalent relationship with Danny overshadows her life.

Before Danny disappeared, Lydia was a bit of a loner. Exceptionally bright and physically immature, her best friend is a boy with whom she enjoys discussing world politics. But after Danny has gone missing, Lydia experiences a surge in her popularity. She is now the sister of a missing person – and Danny’s friends from the football team and the girls who flashed him dazzling smiles begin to include her in their social network.When Lydia is drawn into the investigation by a private detective hired by her parents, she not only begins to uncover the mystery of her brother’s disappearance, but discovers truths about herself.

The Local News, Miriam Gershow’s powerful debut novel, is a nuanced story about Lydia’s coming of age amid this one tragic event in her life. Narrated from Lydia’s point of view, the novel reaches into the psyche of a teenager and examines how it must feel to grow up in the shadow of her popular brother, her parent’s favored child…a boy who Lydia did not always like, but certainly loved.

Not only does The Local News examine the relationship between siblings, but it also explores the power of grief and how that emotion can define our relationships and change our lives…how a single event tainted with loss can change who we become.

Gershow’s prose draws the reader into Lydia’s life quickly – uncovering her strained relationship with her parents, her awkward sexual awakening, her fears and dreams…doubts and guilt. The Local News begs the question: How do we define ourselves? Lydia’s journey begins to answer that question, examining the development of the individual within the greater context of daughter, sister and friend.

Poignant, engaging and sharply imagined, The Local News is a book which will connect with anyone who remembers the pain of being a teenager. Although it is a coming of age story, it is also Danny’s story and the impact his loss has on family and friends. It is a loss the reader feels acutely. Danny is only known to the reader through the eyes of his sister, and yet by the end of the book I felt I knew not only who he was, but who he might have been had fate not intervened.

Gershow has written a very human story – a story which extends beyond the headlines and into the heart of a young girl.

Recommended. ( )

Not so much the story of a missing teen as the story of the resulting uncertainty and sorrow on the family left behind.

In many ways, fifteen-year-old Lydia is better off without her big brother around--Danny and his friends used to tease or ignore her; now she has near-celebrity status at school and is even included in his friends' social circle. Her parents are lost in their grief, but then again she always did come second to her brother. And, while she's somewhat nostalgic for the childhood Danny, truthfully she didn't like him all that much as a teen. The result is a complex protagonist with a riveting story to tell.

The story is told in hindsight, from the perspective of Lydia as an adult, and in fact the final forty pages take place ten years later. I had mixed feelings about this ending. I asked the author about this & more on Worducopia ( )

The story of a missing child as told from the point of view of the sibling. When that sibling is 15-yr-old Lydia, you've got a very interesting book. I know a lot of people preferred the last part of the book but I found the earlier parts that dealt with Lydia as she tried to find her way through her new found status the most interesting. ( )