Long Bright River by Liz Moore; Kensington and Me

Kensington view in 1982; once a manufacturing center, most of the factories were abandoned

A hot, humid Sunday in late July, the atmospherean elixir of chemical smells.No human voice breaks the stillness of hazy air.Here is only the arid stretch of concrete,the glare of sun on trolley tracks,the vacant, lidless, terrible black holesof abandoned factorieswhose broken walls spew silent sighsinto deaf, empty streets.The sky is faded to a worn blue-gray
cloudless under the early strong sun. 

from The City Dead by Nancy A. Bekofske

I had no patience. I had to read Long Bright River NOW. I picked it up on Friday. Saturday it rained all day long and I spent it reading. I finished the novel before I turned out the light to sleep.

I had read Liz Moore's novel The Unknown World and loved it. But my interest in this new novel was it's setting--Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood where we lived for just under two years, leaving in 1982. 

the view from our back door on Allegheny Ave. in 1982

I was a sheltered girl from the Detroit 'burbs. Driving down Allegheny Avenue I once quipped that I never wanted to live there. A few years later, my husband turned down an associate pastor position at a posh suburban church and asked for an inner-city position. And we found ourselves in Kensington, a few blocks from K&A. 

Our home on Allegheny Ave. near B St. was once posh 'doctor's row'

The house had an enclosed porch, once a waiting room, a living room once divided from the dining room and the kitchen in the back. Upstairs were three bedrooms and a bath. The basement had a cedar closet stuffed with every curtain that had hung in the parsonage, a 1930s gas range, and an asbestos covered furnace that powered the hot water heat.

the back bedroom with original closet with shelves

And cockroaches of all types and mice that took over the oven. I cleaned before we cooked--dishes, oven, stove, countertops--everything.

we were surrounded by empty factories

My husband had a two-point charge. The church at Front and Allegheny was larger.

Providence UMC at Front and Allegheny Ave.

Nestled in the middle the neighborhood rowhouses was Mt. Pisgah at Kip and Cambria. 

Mt Pisgah, Kip and Cambria, Kensington

Don't get mad--get even, we were told, was how things were done in Kensington. They laughed at our ideals rooted in an easy life.

The houses were valued at $2,000. They could not afford to move to the $25,000 houses in Mayfair. There was no off-street parking. No jobs. Young adults paired off and had children while still living with their respective parents. The youth hung on street corners under the streetlights. But they kept an eye on things, protecting their own. They always greeted us.

walking to dogs around the block in Kensington

Long Bright River centers on K&A, Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. Once a thriving business center in a working-class neighborhood, but more recently the 'Walmart' for opioid addicts.

Allegheny Avenue, under the El

Allegheny Avenue

In the opening scene, cop Mickey and her partner Lafferty are called when a body is found. 900 overdose victims were found in Kensington the year before, and Mickey fears that her estranged sister Kacey will be the next one.

When more bodies of young women are found, Mickey becomes obsessed with finding her sister, who has been an addict since her teenage years. She risks her job, her relationship with her four-year-old son, and her life as she searches to find Kacey. It is a journey that takes her deep into the back streets off K&A and into the heart of the underworld of drugs, prostitution, and crime.

View of Kensington from the El

Moore's characters are conflicted and real, the plot foreboding and dark, and the setting vividly drawn. It was like I was back.

On every corner was a bar and a small store. In the hot summer nights, we could hear the booming bass of music from the jukebox at our local bar. The summer sun could be relentless. People sat on their 'stoop' and visited in the cooling evening. Kids played in the car-lined streets.

Our neighbors included a man who worked for a neighborhood $1 movie theater with a teenage son. The son would jump from his roof into the yard below when he saw me leave the house. I would not let him get a rise out of me and merely said hello.

On the other side was a family of renters. We would sit on the stoop evenings and chat.

Kensington street in 1980

I walked to K&A and took the El to work. Or we went downtown to Center City to shop or to go to a concert or museum--something the locals never did. All over the city, people stuck to their local neighborhoods. Maybe went to see the Mummer parade on New Year's Day. 

As schoolkids, Mickey and Kacey were bused to the Academy of Music to see The Nutcracker, something we saw several times. For Mickey it was magical.

Allegheny Ave. near B St., looking east toward Kensington Ave. The scene from our stoop.

Other Philly locals appear in the novel, including the adjoining neighborhoods of Fishtown and Port Richmond.

And Olney. When we left Kensington, we moved to Fern Rock, a few blocks from downtown Olney and lived there for seven years. Our Kensington renter neighbors were sad to see us leave and said we were the nicest neighbors they ever had.

me and our dogs at our stoop

The new pastor and his wife moved in. The neighbor boy broke into the house and stole from them. He later killed himself after beating his girl.

 walking the Ave

In 1982, Kensington was still mainly Catholic, white, and blue-collar. Ten years later, it had shifted ethnically, and all over the city, new drugs were taking over. Every now and then I would Goggle and learn more of its decline into the center of drugs and prostitution.

We left Philly in 1990 and returned to Michigan. I never forgot living in the most foreign place I had ever lived in--K&A.

In the novel, Mickey escapes to Bensalem in lower Bucks County; we had moved to Morrisville in Bucks Co. in 1974. It was a world away from Kensington. Mickey's son misses his school friends, his dad who lives in South Philly and who Mickey is avoiding.

The novel has surprising twists, painful scenes, and yet a hopeful ending.

Moore gives the opioid crisis faces and stories and we think, these people, these good people with blasted lives--it could happen to any of us. These children, born to addicts, born with addictions, growing in poverty and without hope. How can we allow this?

The Children
by Nancy A. Bekofske
1982

Our children are dying.
Their eyes, full of broken wings, haunt me,
their questions sear the air like exhaust fumes.

How can we shatter such purity so?

Childhood's haven destroyed,
there is left no serene rock 
upon which to root and grow.
They learn to walk on the jagged edges
of broken dreams, and to feast
on the small parcel of silence
between abuse and misuse.

And who we cannot kill, we strip
of immunity, prey of disease, 
the lure of easy money.
Playing on their porches
they are victims of war.
In the school yard
dogs are let loose on them
or sprays of bullets.

I have seen them on the streets
longing for a place to belong to,
knowing the world is a hard place,
learning to be hard to survive.
Dwarfed, afraid, they murder,
enacting dreams of power and control
over things too big to ever control,
filled with visions of Hollywood glory.

And this is the generation we will age under.

Years hence when we are confronted in anger
we cannot plead innocence:
These children alone are innocent.

The Unseen World by Liz Moore

As I read the last paragraphs my breath caught in a sob, something between tears and amazement, surprise and the regret of ending. A visceral and wholly unexpected reaction. I had come to inhabit this world and know the Sibelius family, experienced Ada's journey, and now it was over and wrapped up in an ending I had not expected, told by a narrator who knows the Sibelius family as ancestors to be remembered and respected.

The Unseen World is a deeply layered and satisfying novel, a coming-of-age story involving the search for the father, a quest for identity, and a revelation of American society's penchant to fearfully target those who are perceived as different.

Dr. David Sibelius and his daughter Ada have an unusual relationship. David is Ada's entire world: mother, father, and teacher; the employees of his lab at Boston Institute of Technology is their extended family.

David's work is in artificial intelligence and his passion is cryptology. Ada participates in his work by talking to ELIXIR, a 'chatbot' program designed to learn human language through conversation. She pours out her daily life to ELIXIR.

One day David gives her a floppy disk with a cryptographic puzzle to solve in her spare time.

Ada adores her father but at age 12 is curious about the lives of  'normal' families and school children. She spys on the family of David's coworker Diana Liston and her beautiful older son William, while younger son Greg in turn watches Ada.

When Ada turns 13 she learns that her father has Alzheimer's syndrome. She endeavors to manage their life and hide his lapses but within a year his condition becomes obvious. Ada is required to attend public school, and when David is placed in a home she moves in with Liston.

As Liston deals with legal issues pertaining to David's care, his estate, and guardenship of Ada, it is discovered that David Sibelius is not who he said he was. Ada becomes obsessed with finding out her father's true identity and solving the cryptographic puzzle which may hold answers.

But discovering David's real identity still leaves the mystery of 'why'. Years pass until Gregory Liston returns with an insight that may solve the puzzle.

Moore captures adolescent society pitch-perfect, Ada's inner world and her apprisal of teenage machinations are spot on, moving and evocative. Ada is a sympathetic and beautifully drawn character.

The writing is wonderful. With subtle inference the reader is allowed to make connections that are later revealed in full. The backstory is told through jumps in time between the 1980s and 2009 with a few chapters dating to David's early life.

The book is rich with multiple themes: identity, the development of artificial intelligence, societal alienation, the father-daughter relationship, and societal prejudices and pograms against people who are different.

I loved reading this novel.

I received an ARC through Shelf Awareness in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Unseen World
W. W. Norton
$26.95 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-393-24168-6