When We Were Bad

Gifted novelist Charlotte Mendelson made her American debut with
this dazzling comedy about the bonds of family and the weight of
expectations. By all outward appearances, the Rubins are the perfect
family: brilliant, successful, enviably close-knit. Then an event of great joy
and celebration -- the marriage of the eldest son -- turns to chaos when the
groom jilts his bride and runs off with a married woman. It's a shock to
everyone in their small Jewish community, most of all to matriarch Claudia,
a successful rabbi. In the wake of this one defiant act, the floodgates to
a ruinous wave of gossip are opened, and the secrets that the Rubins have
been keeping from one another begin to spill forth. All four adult Rubin
children and their parents ultimately must come to terms with their own
inner desires and identities. A perfect reading group selection, When We
Were Bad gives a warm, poignant, and honest portrayal of a family in crisis,
in love, in denial, and, ultimately, in luck.