Laurie Boris

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / CONTACT LAURIE BORIS

The Joke’s on Me, Local Author’s Debut Novel, To Launch in Woodstock

Edmond, Oklahoma, July 26, 2011 – 4RV Publishing is pleased to announce that the contemporary novel The Joke’s on Me, by Hudson Valley author Laurie Boris, has been released. Woodstock bookstore The Golden Notebook will sponsor a reading/signing event at Oriole9 on Friday, August 19 at 7:00 PM.

The Joke’s on Me is Laurie Boris’s debut novel. It’s a story about family love and redemption, told through the eyes of former stand-up comic Frankie Goldberg. Frankie has lived in Los Angeles for the past fifteen years, relegating her family to the outer regions of her solar system while she pursued her own, middling success. But a disaster sends Frankie scrambling back to her mother’s bed and breakfast in Woodstock, New York. She craves comfort, but finds that the joke’s on her. Her much-older sister Jude, who incurred Frankie’s wrath by leaving home when Frankie was just a toddler, has moved in and taken over. She’s put their mother, following a stroke and subsequent memory loss, into a nursing home. Now Jude is turning the nearly bankrupt B&B into a holistic retreat. For her mother’s sake, Frankie agrees to stay for the summer and help. But will Frankie ever consider her sister’s company to be anything but an obligation? Or will the lure of family connection—and a new romance—prove stronger than her urge to bolt toward a fresh start in Hollywood?

The spark that formed the backbone of The Joke’s on Me came from the three years Boris spent working in Woodstock. “I love Woodstock, but the social politics are more complicated than you would think,” she said. “Some locals have a kind of love/hate relationship with the many weekenders and transplants who strain their already strained resources. Locals love the influx of money, but hate fighting for a parking space just to grab a cup of coffee.”

She added that one day when she was stuck in traffic in Woodstock, the seed of the conflict between the squabbling Goldberg sisters took root. “There’s sibling rivalry and abandonment, but it’s also a conflict of values,” Boris said, “between people like Jude, who have immersed themselves in the Woodstock experience and people like Frankie, who think tie-dye and incense should be outlawed. It also speaks to the struggles and comedies many in Frankie’s and Jude’s ‘sandwich’ generation are going through—caring for their children and their declining parents while still making time for significant others, friends, and themselves.”

The novel will be available through any bookstore, the 4RV Publishing website book store, (http://4rvpublishingcatalog.yolasite.com/novels.php) plus other online book providers such as Amazon. Retail price is $18.99; 234 pages. ISBN assigned is 978-0-9826423-9-9.

About Laurie Boris

Laurie Boris, a freelance writer and former graphic designer, has had her short fiction published in small magazines and on the Web. The Joke’s on Me is her debut novel. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband, Paul Blumstein, a commercial illustrator who provided the art for the book’s cover.

A publicity schedule is on the book’s web site, http://thejokesonme.net. To read an excerpt from The Joke’s on Me, go to http://thejokesonme.net/excerpts.

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