Long Bright River: A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)

Living in the area that Ms Moore writes about I can relate to almost everything in this book, even Kaceys disease. I don’t want to spoil this for anyone but you’re not really getting a murder mystery. You’re getting more of a stroy about addiction and its tentacles. It never affects just the user. You can tell by the writing that either Ms Moore has lived this life firsthand or knows someone who does/did because she hit every nail on the head. If I could give this book ten stars I would. Great great writing.

Finally a 5 STAR BOOK!! I was beginning to think something was wrong with me because it has been a while since I read a total 5. This has everything I LOVE in books. Real life, real people, suspense, sad moments and moments that made me MAD...yet happy ones too. Then and Now. I could not put this one down for long. I will remember LBR for many years to come. The chapters are VERY SHORT which helps me fly through a book with excitement. Another thing I really appreciated was that the author just told a fantastic story without adding any political views and or slants at all. Period. Many of us are over the pushing of author/actors views. We read to escape so please stop with that. THANK YOU LIZ MOORE for just writing a book for everyone to enjoy.

LONG BRIGHT RIVER is slow for a while at first. But you want to keep going anyhow. It's well written and obviously setting up a story that will be worth your while. It turns out to be unputdownable.

Most of the book is centered on Michaela's search for her sister, Kacey. Michaela is a cop; Kacey is a drug addict living on the streets. The story is told in alternating THEN and NOW chapters. So you gradually understand more and more of the sisters' background and how the NOW came to be.

LONG BRIGHT RIVER is full of mysteries and unexpected results and solutions. The answers I expected were most often incorrect.

I am so glad I didn't read other reviews of this story before I read it. If I had, I probably would have been given synopses of the story and been unable, then, to anticipate its mysteries as the author had intended.

This is the first time I've given five stars to a book that is slow to start. Believe me, it will be worth your while to read and remember it.

However, I don't add this to my list of "favorites" because of its awkward dialog style, with em dashes used to indicate quotations rather than quotation marks. Quotation marks were invented to aid readability. It is, therefore, rude not to use them.

Liz: Long Bright River “Long Bright River” is an entertaining novel with a very well developed protagonist, Micky. It is also something of a “thriller” as Micky investigates killings, and a social novel, about: an area of Philadelphia called Kensington where opioid abuse is rife; family members trying to deal with the addiction of someone dear to them; a police department unwilling to root out the many bad apples. Is the police department as bad as it is portrayed? Certainly in these times it is easy to believe, and there have been some bad scandals in Philadelphia, but I would have felt better if there were an afterword as to sources. The author was interviewed at the Free Library of Philadelphia about the novel, by a journalist who writes about Kensington, but he did not bring up police corruption.

As a novelist, Moore’s strong points are plot and dialogue - it is unsurprising that she expressed great interest in screen writing, and she is writing a script for a movie version of the novel. The secondary characters are well drawn, realistic, with good as well as bad qualities. I also particularly liked how Micky becomes convinced, successively, of several people’s guilt. Some editing would be useful, eliminating for example some of Micky’s commonplace paeans to motherhood. Micky’s extended family is not as universally low-life as she portrays them, for example an uncle who owns an auto dealership, but she is not intended to be a totally reliable narrator.

SPOILER ALERT: In the Free Library interview the author expressed pride in the fact that Micky evolves as a character. Micky is remorseful about having asked how the sister knows who is the father. But how does the sister know, given that Micky has observed her working as a prostitute? Circumstances change, Micky’s father and sister become clean, Micky can no longer think of her police job as being one to be proud of, but has Micky’s personality really changed that much? From the beginning she tried to look out for all the addicts on the corners, and not think as badly of her neighborhood as many of her fellow policemen did.

Long Bright River is a detailed story of addiction, family dysfunction, predatory behavior & police work. Yet, it is also about love, bonds, friendship & belonging. The chapters are split into "Then" & "Now", which is helpful as the story is constantly moving back & forth in time. The " Then" chapters really illustrate how choices have consequences & impact the present day. So many instances where if just one thing had been done differently, everything else that followed would have had a different outcome. The theme of addiction really reminded me of the TV series "Nurse Jackie" in that you come to understand it as a true illness that has not only physical, but often has psychological & biological roots. It's complex & not just something to be judged as a failure of will. The amount of detail & recount, while it did serve the narrative, got to be a little weighed down in spots. The book might've been about 50-100 pages shorter if not for that. But that did make it an immersive read. Definitely not a feel-good story. It makes you yearn for something (anything!) good to happen for the characters. And it ultimately does, but not with the triumph that some readers might prefer. Overall, I'm glad to have read this book and would certainly recommend it. The writing is excellent & the characters stay with you. Enjoy!

I read this book in one sitting, and it was worth it. It looks deceptively long on a shelf due to how it was formatted. There is so much going on, so many "mysteries" to be solved, beyond a homicide spree and missing sister. It unfolds like a traditional "pop-novel" rather than a cop drama novel.

The plot follows Mickey, a cop and her beat Kensington, a down an out neighborhood in Philadelphia. As the book points out, and as I remember when living in the area, Kensington has been down and out for I dunno 50 years? The crime and the drug use there is almost institutionalized, another thing the book reflects.  Never before I have I seen opioid addiction and prostitution used as such a great plot device. This is a gritty cop novel, yes, but there is so much more to the writing. Fans of the genre might actually be let down because it reads more like a character study at times. 

Previous reviews have described Mickey as an unreliable narrator and reflect on that type of writing. I don't know if she is, or is Moore is simply reflecting a trend in narration that has been popular in the last four or five years, which is humanistic narration. It is admitting that memories are fallible, even in fiction. I think also the time frame of the novel can be confusing, because the events at hand seem to take place over four or five months, but it can feel like years given the writing style.

Worth the read. The writing is approachable, the characters neither likable or dislikeable, but the story is good. 

Many of the blurbs describing “Long, Bright, River” (LBR) label it a thriller. No way. While there are several passages with tension, none of it rises to the level of nail-biting, and the second ingredient for a thriller, “action”, just isn’t here. Lee Child writes thrillers, as does Brad Taylor, Joseph Flynn, Daniel Silva, etc. Liz Moore’s book, while good, ain’t no thriller. So what is it then, crime fiction? That label also appeared in some endorsements. No, not crime fiction. Some people were easily misled because our protagonist is a cop, and deals with a dead body in an opening scene. So what are we left with then? How to categorize LBR?

It’s good fiction, not great fiction, though many will probably debate that point. It seems like LBR has been pre-ordained to be a Big Book of 2020, at least in the early going. Lots of recognition, mentions, even an award or two. I think it’s a bit over-rated.

As mentioned above, Mickey is a cop, a young, inexperienced one. She is also a single Mom of a 4 year old boy. Mickey has a younger sister, a druggie, by the name of Kacey. Much of the book, and I mean MUCH, deals not with crime but with Mickey’s and Kacey’s history and relationship. And their single Mom, and their mean, irascible grandmother. And Kacey’s drug problems and occasional prostitution, and attempts to get clean, and her failures, and ditto for too many of the poor young women who somehow manage to survive in a run down section of Philadelphia. The prose is well done, but too many scenes are a bit too long; it feels like it may have been a better book with 50 to 100 fewer pages. So no editing awards for this one. And it’s depressing. The story feels researched, not lived, and the ending feels a little too pat, so four stars seems a bit too generous.