Long Bright River

I can see I’m an outlier here, but I really didn’t enjoy this book. Admittedly, the subject matter is grim (broken families, working class neighborhoods, kids dropping out of school, poverty, drugs, sex workers, murder), but lord, this is BLEAK.

Perhaps it would have been easier to take if Mickey had been a more likeable protagonist, but she’s not. She’s 33 and still hasn’t stopped resenting things that happened when she was a kid. She’s humorless. She's self-righteous. She has thirteen years on the police force, but claims she can’t afford a decent apartment or reliable childcare and spends a crazy % of the book arranging it, mostly asking for it free or for sub-minimum wage from other women. She seems to spend almost nothing on clothes (but resents women who do); she barely drinks, doesn’t smoke – where is her money going? Why hasn't she, after almost five years, realized that she needs reliable childcare? And why hasn't she realized that she needs to transfer to a job that has childcare-friendly schedules? They do exist; look at how she met the baby-daddy, Simon. He transferred to the Police Athletic League when he had a son, precisely to avoid the tyranny of schedules that rotate between 8a-4p, 4p-midnight, or midnight-8a. It must be impossible to arrange childcare around such a schedule, but Mickey acts as though she has no choice when she indeed has one.

Google tells me that cops with her seniority in PA make a lot more than school teachers, (as in, they make $60-$80k/yr: nowhere near poverty. The author describes it as poverty; it is not) yet she aspires to be a teacher because (as far as I can tell) she thinks it’s a classier occupation. I mean, yes, her childhood was terrible, but people have overcome worse without a massive chip on the shoulder and lingering class resentment.

The other characters are very thinly-drawn. Is it my imagination or are all the men a bit slow-witted?

I apologize if I have any of my facts about the book wrong, but I am NOT going through the pain of reading it twice. Such a shame, since the book has been widely hyped in the media and is to be filmed. If I were Amy Pascal, I’d hire rewrite on the Mickey character.