39 pages • 1 hour read
Liz MooreLong Bright River
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Then”
Mickey recalls a school outing when she was eleven and Kacey was nine. They went with their classmates to a performance of The Nutcracker. The children come from a poor neighborhood and feel completely out of place among the middle-class families attending the theater. Mickey is impressed by the Academy of Music and the make-believe world onstage.
When Kacey and the others start a ruckus that disturbs the other theatergoers, the group is ejected at intermission. Mickey says, “Kacey was like this, always: doing what she shouldn’t do, demanding a rebuke, daring the adults in her life to come down harder and harder on her, testing the limits of their anger” (57).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Now”
Mickey is irritated by Lafferty’s dismissive attitude toward the prostitutes of Kensington and tells Ahearn that she doesn’t want to be partnered with him anymore. Until her regular partner, Truman Dawes, returns from sick leave, she decides to work solo. One morning at roll call, a detective from Homicide, Davis Nguyen, tells the patrol officers that two girls have been strangled in Kensington, and the Jane Doe that Mickey discovered might be the third victim of a serial killer.
After hearing this news, Mickey is concerned about her sister and decides to check up on Kacey. She goes to a convenience store to stake out the corner where her sister usually works as a prostitute. Mickey is disgusted by the men who prey on junkies. She says, “Quite simply, I hate them: their physicality repulses me, their greed, their willingness to take advantage, their inability to control the basest of their instincts” (70). She asks the store owner, Alonzo, if he’s seen her sister. He’s surprised that Mickey hasn’t heard the news: Kacey has been missing from the neighborhood for a month.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Then”
Mickey recalls the earliest days of her childhood. Kacey has always blamed her own unhappiness on the loss of their parents, which baffles her older sister. “I looked at her, blinking, and said to her as levelly as I could that I grew up in the same household as she did” (77).
Their mother became pregnant with Mickey while still in high school. She hastily married their father to maintain respectability. Kacey came along one-and-a-half years later. The girls’ parents were poor and moved in with Gee. Although Gee loved her daughter, she resented the entire arrangement. The girls’ mother died of a drug overdose when Mickey was four. Gee blamed their father for getting their mother hooked, and she eventually drove him out of the house. Twenty years later, he died of an overdose himself.
The sisters experience an impoverished and neglectful childhood, though they remain close to one another until their teens. Mickey is bookish and introverted, while Kacey is outgoing and brash. They diverge on separate paths soon after attending an afterschool Police Athletic League (PAL) program to mentor at-risk youth in the neighborhood. Though Kacey quickly loses interest, Mickey becomes infatuated with a handsome officer named Simon Cleare, who takes a genuine interest in her well-being. Mickey finds him handsome:
He had black, combed-back hair, and sideburns just slightly longer than the rest of the male officers, which in 1997 was quite fashionable, and dark eyebrows that inched together minutely when he read something he found particularly interesting (88).
Over the years, Mickey stays in the PAL program so she can remain close to Simon. Eventually, she becomes part of the paid staff. Shortly after Kacey’s first overdose, a distraught Mickey turns to Simon for comfort, and their relationship takes a more personal turn.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In this set of chapters, the murder investigation escalates as Homicide discovers two new victims. These facts serve to amplify Mickey’s concern about her sister. While the interplay between the two sisters continues to receive focus, the reader becomes aware of some of the reasons for their divergent paths as she describes the toxic nature of their upbringing. The drug culture of Kensington is literally brought home to the reader and the girls when their mother dies of an overdose. This is traumatic enough without the added problem of a grandmother who is anything but maternal. Gee emerges in this segment as the embodiment of the toxic families that populate Kensington.
The theatre scene highlights the theme of toxic families and effectively foils the two sisters from an early age. The sisters grow up in a lower-class environment and find that they’re not welcome in middle-class circles. Mickey’s interest in the theatre and fascination with the stage setting reveal her ambition for a better life. She feels she doesn’t belong with her family and wishes to progress—a trend that carries her into the police force later in life. Mickey is determined to behave, but she notes that Kacey is constantly pushing boundaries. Mickey becomes a police officer dedicated to order and law, while Kacey becomes a junky and prostitute, dedicated to her next fix and lawlessness.
Kacey’s story, too, develops the theme of cycles of addiction. Her mother and father were addicts, Kacey’s an addict, and we later learn that Kacey was born addicted to drugs, as was Thomas. Kacey tries to blame her upbringing for her addiction, but Mickey points out that she had the same upbringing and does not have the same predilection for addiction. This moment foreshadows the revelation that Kacey did not, in fact, have the advantage of being born clean as Mickey had. This difference between the sisters lies at the center of the novel’s conflict, as does the concept of breaking cycles of addiction.
While the theme of police corruption also appears in these chapters, the reader isn’t yet aware of the full extent of these abuses of power. When we first meet Simon, he seems benign in his efforts to support the PAL program and mentor the youth in the district. It is only in hindsight that the reader realizes what his true motives are. Similarly, Lafferty is dismissive of the dead Kensington prostitutes because he believes they are the dregs of humanity anyway. Mickey’s instinctive dislike of him telegraphs a subconscious awareness that he is not someone she can trust. Her boss, Ahearn, echoes Lafferty’s lack of concern for the murder victims. His negative attitude toward Mickey is at least partially attributable to his bond with Lafferty. Ahearn realizes that Mickey doesn’t approve of some of the department’s standard practices. She isn’t willing to look the other way simply because the murder victims aren’t respectable.
We also learn from this section and the section prior that Mickey doesn’t trust men, though we don’t yet know why. We see that Moore doesn’t have anything good to say about any of the adult male figures in the novel thus far: she disparages Ahearn as feeling intimidated by Mickey, shows Mickey’s dislike of Lafferty, reveals Simon as cruel in comparison to Thomas, and we learn of Mickey’s disgust for the johns that prey on drug addicts, like Kacey.
As the reader knows Simon is the father of Mickey’s “son,” the author leads us to believe that he fathered the child with Mickey: a misdirection that adds to Mickey and Kacey’s mysterious backgrounds. Moore is creating a tension here to keep her reader interested in Mickey’s flashbacks.
