Long Bright River: A Novel

When I started this book, I mistakenly thought it was about a dysfunctional family. There is that, but so much more. It is a convoluted mystery involving corruption, addiction, misplaced loyalties, lost and found families, with a good but also uncertain ending. It is filled with unreliable characters and I still don’t know if I even like the narrator, but I loved the book.

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Long Bright River by Liz Moore
480 pages

What’s it about?
Mickey and Kacey are sisters who grew up in a working class Philadelphia neighborhood. Although they were once close, they now no longer speak. Kacey is an addict living on the streets of the old neighborhood, and Mickey is a patrol officer in that same neighborhood. Then a string of murders hit the neighborhood and Kacey goes missing.....

What did it make me think about?
The title of the book refers to the long bright river of departed souls from the opioid crisis. This book made me think about addiction, gentrifying neighborhoods, the way we police those neighborhoods, and of course- family.

Should I read it?
This was a great book! One of my favorites so far this year. This was a family drama wrapped up in a mystery. It also gave me a glimpse into a world I do not live in.

Quote-
"In a moment of clarity, once, Kacey told me that time spent in addiction feels looped. Each morning brings with it the possibility of change, each evening the shame of failure."

If you liked this try-
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney
My Sunshine Away by M.O. Walsh
The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

As the sister of an addict, I share a lot of the narrators thoughts. I don’t have the exact experiences she had, but we have the same sentiments. The paralyzing fear of the possibility of something horrible happening followed by the routine summoning of a “lethargic, uninspired, dutiful dull soldier”. It’s like someone putting a gun to your head a hundred times and never actually pulling the trigger. The paying attention to the statistics. Watching every drug addict you see in the street and conditioning yourself to recognize your sibling in their heavy eyes as they melt into the ground. It’s interesting how everyone goes to the period of detachment too, where you watch them become someone else and tear away from you, cutting the strings that held you together. You know very well when it’s the first of many parts of their life that they’re going to attempt to keep hidden from you, and then there’s nothing you truly know about them anymore, because they’re someone else all together. There are shadows of them to misidentify on street corners and abandon buildings if you dare to enter them. There are lines about the resilience of a dying thing that ring like a bell in my head because when you have a drug addict in the family, you come to terms with the fact that they have 100 lives and it doesn’t feel like they’re alive by the grace of god when you receive the tenth hospital bill, another overdose. You wonder where they found him this time. They’re alive because of the drug addict whose willing to call an ambulance and disappear before they get there, a pedestrian watching them turn blue says something about it, and the bless-ed intervention of narcan. But their death feels like the end of something good for you - the way you knew them, the memory, but it seems like the end of something long arduous and terrible for them. You think, “now, I must shoulder all the weight of our lives together. I must be the one that is not the burden.” But the gun that was up to your head is put down once again when the oxygen rushes back to their burned out brain, when they immediately begin to withdraw and remember all the pain they’ve endured and caused, and their first thought is to rush back into our hell, and the warmth and painlessness of heroins arms. I remember there were nights I gasped for air in the middle of the night in my bed, and a week or two later we would get a hospital bill for the same night. Sorry for the rant, but I say all this to say that while this book is a mystery novel, it paints such a beautifully vulnerable and deeply intimate portrait of a sibling of an addict coming to terms with every aspect of her own life and trauma, the deeply complex layers of all our humanity to reconcile the good and bad in all of us, and the serpentine path we lead ourselves down as we reckon with our generational and biological curses. So, so, so worth the read if you aren’t super triggered by the subject matter. I will agree however with some other reviewers that there are loose ends that I wish were tied up more delicately as the book came to a close. The meticulousness with which each relationship was built throughout the story made me feel as though they needed more attention and time paid to them at the end. I cared more about these relationships than I did about the crimes, but the way it ended made me feel like when the crime was solved the story of the main character needed to end quickly and it shouldn’t have. I would stuck around to know how these characters I grew so fond of would go on.

I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. I had high expectations after reading Heft, but this fell short. It is a very well written story about two sisters whose lives take very different turns. Mickey, is a bright young girl who has dreams of going to college but instead joins the police academy. Her younger sister, Kacey, falls into a life of drugs and living on the streets. Mickey is often patrols the same beat where her sister now lives. When a string of homicides happen in Mickey's district and Kacey disappears, Mickey becomes obsessed with finding the killer and her sister before it is too late.

I liked the alternating then and now. I really liked Mickey and her landlord, Mrs. Mahon. But it was way too long!

A very long build up for a fast wind-down. I kind of appreciate the open-ended ending, the lack of a feel-good, hopeful close. Overall though, the rest of the story felt very predictable non-dimensional