Customer Reviews

Bright Forever

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The Bright Forever is one of those rare page-turners with a wise underbelly. Its suspense operates on two levels: It is, very simply, a "who dunnit" that even when you're sure you know, you can't stop reading. That's because Martin is doing something else: To the reader's surprise when the book is closed, he's left a question mark that haunts, that won't easily be answered, that this reader couldn't stop thinking about. Yes, we want to know who took nine-year-old Katie, whether she'll be found and what will be done about the evil that lies herein. Herein is small-town America, herein is a highly specific itty bitty town in Indiana and herein is the human heart at its best and worst. We get the story from four narrators: Mr. Dees, Katie's tutor; Gilley, Katie's older brother; Clare, Mr. Dees' neighbor and wife of handyman Raymond; and a wise omniscient narrator who holds their stories together and who, at the end of this fine novel, joins us in our search and gives us a day-by-day accounting. The way this novel breaks the heart is the biggest surprise because Martin plumbs the depths of our humanity by humanizing the worst in us all. How he does this not only amazes, it breaks the heart and recalls the work of Nabokov in that still startling novel Lolita. But Martin makes us look at ourselves even harder than the masterful Nabokov did in that memorable book.

This book is dark. It involves the abduction of a nine year old girl from a small Indiana town in the summer of 1971. Unfortunately, this story happens all the time in real life and I wouldnt doubt it was based on one or more true stories. It was totally believable. There are two men in the town with dirty secrets. One has a thing for children. The other is addicted to drugs. They are next door neighbors and use and blackmail each other. The story builds like a jigsaw puzzle, a piece at a time. Each time you think you know what really happened, there's something else. The author examines the guilt of all the characters, raising complex issues of morality. You do find out what really happened, as well. There is "closure" on that matter, which sadly is often lacking for families that actually go through an experience like this. I think it's definitely worth reading, although some may find the story upsetting. I'd be interested in this author's other books.

Is "The Bright Forever," a Pulitzer Prize finalist by Lee Martin, the most original work out there? Absolutely not; Martin clearly owes a debt to Alice Sebold's "Lovely Bones" and to last years "Case Histories," and the novel does suffer a little from a sense of been-there, read-that. But the good news is that Martin is an intelligent, perceptive, and capable writer, so he manages to craft a story that succeeds on its own right in territory that others have tread before. For starters, Martin imbues his characterizations with amazing psychological acuity -- he puts you into the head of several different characters in the narrative form to effects that range from devastating to enlightening. The characters who do not narrate the story are equally deep and affecting: you feel heartbroken by the innocence and typical-9-year-old naivete of the doomed Katie Mackey, burned by the anguish of Katie's social-climbing parents, and intrigued by the tangled web of resentment and despair that makes up Raymond R. Wright. The way the characters interact with each other and react to their surroundings pulls you through to the conclusion with an effortless ease that contradicts the novel's disquieting premise. Martin also has a keen eye for setting, and by the fourth page he has you completely grounded in small-town America and what it means to live in the "flyover zone" of the American landscape. The plot is impeccably structured to its back-and-forth flashbacks that have you on the day of Katie's disappearance in one chapter, four days later the next, and in between pausing for commentary from the narrators who are recalling what happened thirty years later. "The Bright Forever" would be a great selection for a book club, because it leaves you with a lot of questions that would make for a great group discussion (accordingly, the novel has a reading guide at the end for further contemplation). Martin's effortless writing skill makes for a fine reading experience where his novel could have coasted on its familiarity.

THE BRIGHT FOREVER is a haunting, evocative story about a little girl who never comes home from a trip to the library, and the complex, fractured lives of the people who have played a role in her brief existence. The novel is a treat to read: brilliantly suspenseful, thought-provoking, and beautifully and compassionately written.

In a summer night in 1972 Tower Hill, Indiana, nine-year-old Katie bikes to the library but fails to return home. Her family owns the "itty-bitty" town's biggest business a glassworks firm and is considered Tower Hill's First Family so when something happens, townsfolk react.

Katie's parents and her teenage older brother seem to love Katie, who always appeared contented. Her summer math tutor reticent lonely Henry kissed the preadolescent on the day she vanished and has stolen hair from her bedroom; he feels guilty for his pedophilic desires but his student respected him something he has never known especially during his abusive childhood. Remarried widow Clare knows her charming abusive spouse Raymond has drug induced blackouts and wonders could he have killed the girl. Raymond knows that pathetic Henry has a crush on the little girl and uses it.

Though hope remains at first, as days pass, a stunned town believes the First Daughter is dead. The searchers become angry while pondering their own transgressions; increasingly the conversation turns towards avenging vigilante righteousness.

Readers will appreciate this tense thriller that brings the underlying tension of the Ox-Bow Incident to the 1970s. The seemingly simple act of riding a bike turns ugly forcing everyone to introspect on their own sins as the changing perspectives enable the audience to understand the actions and reactions over a few days to the missing child; especially intriguing is Katie's parents wondering if they are being "punished". The collective guilt (though overdone) insures that THE BRIGHT FOREVER turns eternally dark for the townsfolk as the loss of innocence means no counterbalance to the eternal gloom of adulthood's reality shattering youthful dreams.

Harriet Klausner

There is a moment late in Lee Martin's The Bright Forever when a strange new piece of evidence emerges concerning the whereabouts of nine-year-old Katie Mackey. The girl's disappearance is the central event around which the novel unveils the carefully guarded lives of the people of Tower Hill, Indiana. As the citizens retire from an exhaustive, rain-soaked day of searching for Katie, they ponder the new revelation while drifting off to sleep. At the chapter's end, the reader is left awake, as if standing in the darkened village square with only an empty stone courthouse and the brush of wind against the sidewalks and shop windows. You might interpret this as an act of hospitality---an invitation to take a small break, perhaps make a cup of tea or even catch a few hours of sleep if, like me, you find yourself having read deep into the night. It would be un-neighborly, in fact, for the book not to offer such a moment of repose. Which makes it even more chilling.

You won't accept this kindness because you know what sort of men are still awake in Tower Hill, men like Raymond Wright, a boisterous and extroverted construction worker who offers too much advice and harbors a dark alter-ego, or the bachelor Henry Dees, a polite and fastidious schoolteacher who becomes, as the novel peels away layer after layer, one of the most simultaneously engaging and creepy characters in recent memory. They are awake, Katie is missing, and by now you know that the conclusion of The Bright Forever will be as vital and utterly compelling as what had come before.

Lee Martin renders an Indiana town with a façade of congeniality as the perfect backdrop for the increasingly dark interrogation of his characters' interior lives. Clare Mains is the late middle-aged woman who marries Raymond R. because loving people was "all she knew how to do." But beneath her effort to ward off a lonely widowhood, she senses the strangeness of her new husband and yet shows a merciless cunning when their relationship is threatened by events. Gilbert and Patsy Mackey, Katie's parents, live with a deep regret despite their manicured lives, their suburban royalty unspoiled until Katie fails to return one evening from the public library. Their son Gilley, a bright and particular boy, is conflicted between his love of family and the sense that he, too, is something of a strange bird like Henry Dees or even Raymond R.

The Bright Forever is masterfully narrated by multiple voices, and together they make a sort of chorus, though each is distinct and nuanced through Martin's graceful prose and ear for dialect. Their song is about our love for beauty and the violent side of human nature, and they whisper a final refrain about the tragic ways these two essential compulsions can meet.

This novel got me through a long plane ride -- it's both riveting and beautifully written although definitely emotionally painful as well. I love the way Lee Martin captures the rhythm of small-town life and I equally admire the way he gently leads the reader into a compassionate view of even the most potentially loathsome of characters. Two thumbs up!

Thirty years ago, in a small Indiana town, nine-year-old Katie Mackey rode her bike to the library to return some books. She never returned home.

In "The Bright Forever," author Lee Martin tells the story of a little girl who disappears and the people that surround the mystery. The Mackeys were considered by most people to be the best family in town: the family that everyone else wished they could be a part of. Mr. Dees certainly felt that way. A lonely, middle-aged math teacher, Mr. Dees fell in love with Katie Mackey...but not in the way you might think. Did Mr. Dees have something to do with Katie's disappearance? What about Raymond Ray Wright, that nosey drug addict who moved in on Clare Mains before her late husband was even cold in the grave? And what secrets are Junior and Patsy Mackey hiding, along with their son, Gilley?

There are so many unanswered questions to this mystery, and the truth comes out eventually, but there is much more going on below the surface. "The Bright Forever" is narrated from multiple characters' points of view, and just when the reader thinks they have everything figured out, another clue is revealed that throws everything else off base.

This is a very dark novel, but it's incredibly captivating...you'll have a hard time putting it down. "The Bright Forever" leaves readers wondering who is truly to blame for what happens to Katie, and which choices ultimately resulted in such a horrible tragedy.

A tragic book...painful to read...yet I couldn't stop. I wanted/needed to know what happened to the young girl in the story...Katie. The characters were well-written and you felt for them all. This book grabs you...gets you involved.

This was definately one of those books you just can't put down. It even gives you that option at the end of the first chapter. The chapters are written by different characters of the story, with one being the main, in a time and setting that makes you feel that it's real. I would call this a masterfully articulated literary suspense novel and would recommend it to anyone that loves a good story that makes you "feel".