Good read, but fiction? Not exactly ...

books:


	• The Bright Forever: A Novel Lee Martin Three Rivers Press, 2006 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 67 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Efficiently Simple to Powerful Effect

The Bright Forever Surprised me. By it's rather hokey cover with the little blonde curl on it, I went into it thinking it would probably be a lightweight summer read. I was wrong.

Lee Martin's writing was, from cover to cover, superbly powerful and simple. His writing is so bullseye efficient that it deceptively makes the book seem simple. Martin's simply pointed and poignant prose effected a sleight of hand effect, and one that the Pulitzer Prize judges obviously and rightly admired. Wow. Martin captured the nuance of each and every character with absolutely deft.

Characters Gilley, Junior Mackey, and Raymond R. Wright's wife were perfectly crafted. Martin left just enough doubt surrounding Raymond R. Wright and Mr. Dees to keep you wondering just who did what to whom until the very last page. I loved it. I see that some thought The Bright Forever was a knockoff of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Having read (and liked) both, I disagree. Although the subject matter was similar, literarily they were completely unique. The Bright Forever is a quick, page-turning, and worthwhile read not to be missed.

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Good read, but fiction? Not exactly ...

Many reviews of this story comment that the characters seem almost too real. There is a good reason for that ... it is because they ARE real. I just finished this book and I can't decide if I loved it or hated it. I loved Mr. Martin's writing and would read other works by him. However, I am angry with him for not at least acknowledging the tragedy of his hometown that this story is based on.

Finding this book was a complete fluke--I had no idea when I bought it that Lee Martin was from a town 10 minutes away from my hometown and grew up there the same time I did. As I read his book, I turned the pages with growing disbelief as one of the true horrors of my childhood, and undoubtedly of his own, unfolded on the pages. I kept thinking the similarities between the real story and his book were too weird for him not to have some intimate knowledge of the incident. It was at the end of the novel when he talks about meeting the Candyman in his hometown of Sumner, IL, that I realized it wasn't just coincidence; he was there, too. Why he would mention the Candyman, who we all knew, but not the true incident of the kidnapping and murder, baffles me.

This actual details of the real kidnapping are nearly identical--the date, the season, the bicycle, the library, the affluent family, even the ugly truck and the drug-addled perpetrator. He barely even changed the names of the family or the victim. I am floored at how little of the original story he changed and yet never once that I have seen has he credited or even offered condolences to the family in my hometown who lived this tragedy. This kidnapping shook our town to the core and changed the way we looked at each other forever. I appreciate his writing, and I suppose his imagined insights into the thoughts of the characters allow him to call it fiction, but I can't believe that the truth of his Pulitzer-nominated "fiction" has not yet come to light. Perhaps this isn't an issue to anyone else in the world, but to the family of this little girl, and her friends and neighbors who lived the agony of her disappearance and murder, Mr. Lee at least owes an acknowledgement.

Lovely writing, but the omission of the truth of his inspiration, for me, overshadows the virtues of the novel.

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Touching book, some shaky moments

Before I say anything else, I can't understand why some reviewers commented on this book being very similar or a "rip-off" of Sebold's "The Lovely Bones." Why? Because the subject of both books were quietly, provacatively told tales of a young girl's disappearance and the grief of her family? Books sharing subject matter are not the "same" or "rip-offs" of one another. If that were so, we would be sadly limited in point of view, tone, vision, etc. Assuming people who read "Bones" craved more of the same subject, I can't understand why they would complain when they got what they wished for. There really weren't that many similarities other than subject.
Anyway, there were several points in the book that were so simply and eloquently written I will never forget them. However, I was a little surprised this was a Pulitzer finalist. I found, like another reviewer, that some of the characters were difficult to truly believe in, Katie and Mr. Dees in particular.
Overall, the book was touching, evocative of many scenes from my own childhood (which really puts the reader "into" the story), and so well crafted in some ways that the more poignant moments snuck up on my and surprised me by bringing tears to my eyes.

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How anticlimatic

This is a fairly unoriginal story. I've read or seen similar plots on TV/Film. The writing is self is solid but the characters and scenarios aren't well developed. The story doesn't tie very well together and then the ending is very anticlimatic.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books.

This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a suspenseful, deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Keeping fact, speculation, and contradiction playing off one another as the details unfold, author Lee Martin creates a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. His beautiful, clear-eyed prose builds to an extremely nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss.

Reminiscent of books such as The Little Friend and The Lovely Bones, but most memorable for its own perceptions and power, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth.

A Featured Alternate of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Book-of-the-Month Club

Also available as a Books on Tape AudioBook and an eBook

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