Long Bright River

 

Long Bright River by Liz Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sold as a mystery, this is more of a study of sisterhood, one sister who happens to be drawn into a mystery because she is a patrol cop and is worried her missing sister may be the next serial killer's victim. The Philadelphia neighborhood where Mickey patrols and grew up in becomes the most important character. It is a study of how the working poor, beaten down and suspicious of those who keep them down, develop a pride of their own and can shame anyone trying to get out. Interestingly, it is more socially acceptable to "get out" by developing a drug habit than by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. When drugs are so prevalent, there develops a new sort of equilibrium where the law tolerates some behaviors to concentrate on others. Where is that line? When drugs becomes so prevalent and accepted, how do you not get drawn in? How do you get out? Who's fault is it when you succumb? When does the law no longer become responsible for socially accepted behavior? what about family? Do you cut them off, take away rights, or just make sure they get clean needles? Obviously it raises a lot of interesting questions but I did not like the physical formatting of the book. I thought the lack of quotation marks added to the interiority of the novel (Is she speaking or thinking). But I'm still trying to figure out the reason for the breaks that follow every third paragraph or so. Wasn't a change of perspective, passing of time, or even new thought sometimes. Made the novel a bit choppy for me.

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This was the secret I learned that day: None of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping.  There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.

When, at bedtime, he falls asleep on me, I keep holding him.  Like I'm applying pressure to a wound.  Keeping the blood inside him.

Nicholas Nickleby

 

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finished a Dickens novel! Up to this pointed I have started several, but never finished one (not including A Christmas Carol ). Don't ask me why it would be Nickleby, which I found out afterwards is not one of his better novels. However, I did know it was written in serial form and I imagined what it would be like to wait in anticipation for the continuation of a story. Like the precursor of soap operas, I could see the draw in finding what happened to Nicholas, his sister, and the monstrous villain Uncle Ralph. Yes, it is sentimental, melodramatic, melancholic, and romantic but so are soap operas. It has a passable plot and some biting criticism on materialism and capitalism, but what really saves the day for me is Noggs, Ralph's s poorly used secretary, who quietly and sneakily unravels all of Ralph's nefarious plots against Nicholas. It possess the themes and motifs of Dickens from class disparity to child neglect and abuse, and comical characters.

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Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class, and not of an individual.

not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

for gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal—

Spite is a little word; but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings, and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.

A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with a high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his operations, from a thickly-peopled city, to a mountain road, and you shall find in him the very soul of poetry and adventure.

and in letters afflicted with every possible variation of spinal deformity,

Is selfishness a necessary ingredient in the composition of that passion called love, or does it deserve all the fine things which poets, in the exercise of their undoubted vocation, have said of it?

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues—faith and hope.

He knew himself well, and choosing to imagine that all mankind were cast in the same mould, hated them; for, though no man hates himself, the coldest among us having too much self-love for that, yet most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

As the traveller sees farthest by day, and becomes aware of rugged mountains and trackless plains which the friendly darkness had shrouded from his sight and mind together, so, the wayfarer in the toilsome path of human life sees, with each returning sun, some new obstacle to surmount, some new height to be attained. Distances stretch out before him which, last night, were scarcely taken into account, and the light which gilds all nature with its cheerful beams, seems but to shine upon the weary obstacles that yet lie strewn between him and the grave.

When men are about to commit, or to sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.