I swear that most of Lippman's stand alone novels are just not that great. This one was pretty bad from beginning to end. The premise sounded interesting, a recently separated woman (Maddie Schwartz) who forces herself into a new job at a newspaper starts investigating a murder. We also get the ghosts's point of view of Maddie's investigations. Then the book just drifts and drags through about a dozen points of view. The book was all over the place and I honestly don't know what I was supposed to feel or even care about in the end. Maddie was a pretty terrible character and so was the so called Lady in the Lake when you get to the end. 

"Lady in the Lake" follows Madeline “Maddie” Schwartz. After leaving her husband and son she decides to start again in Baltimore. Maddie is focused on leaving something behind. As a woman she feels like the only marks that anyway cares about is her being a wife and mother. When Maddie becomes entangled in two murder investigations, she ends up being able to talk herself into a job at the Star (a leading newspaper I guess in Baltimore). Maddie finds herself puzzling out who killed a young girl as well as an older African America woman who is found in a city park lake. The story shifts between following Maddie and readers getting into the mind of the woman found in the city park lake, called "Lady in the Lake." The story shits and bobs along to everyone who had contact with the dead woman. We also have Maddie sorting out her marriage and her affair with a black police officer. 

Maddie is selfish to the core. The story starts with her giving a dinner party and then her being angry that her husband invited someone she knew from high school who was in love with her. It ends with her going yes I will leave my husband. I never really got a sense of Maddie. She's "investigating" but not really. She's going around being nosy and using information she is given to pretty much harass a dead woman's family. I just felt turned off by the whole thing. 

Besides getting the "Lady in the Lake's" point of view, no one else is really developed. We get a point of view of a young woman that meets Maddie when she wants to sell her jewelry, we get the point of view of the dead woman's coworker, of a married woman, etc. It just started to drive me batty after a while. 

The writing was so-so. I think starting each chapter with the heading of the description of the person instead of their freaking name was when I started to tap out of the book. The dialogue was not that great and Maddie's insights made me roll my eyes. 

The flow was bad, leaping back and forth between people and then also trying to keep straight the month that the book was taking place in was just too much to focus on. 

The book takes place in Baltimore in 1966, but honestly the book felt weird to me. Maddie is involved with Ferd, and the relationship is discussed, but in an abstract way. People kept talking to Maddie about the Democrats and getting people elected but it started to feel weird after a while. Like Lippman did not want to portray Maddie as racist. Newsflash, sleeping with a person of color is not a racism out of jail free card. 

The ending was laughable bad. I don't even know what to say except that. 

Wow. I did not like this.

"Lady in the Lake" follows Maddie Schwartz who walks out on her marriage looking for something more than being a wife and mother. Something more means talking her way into a job at a newspaper where she starts to report on the murder of a young girl and then on an young African American woman. Maddie relentlessly follows leads so she can be the one to report on the so-called Lady in the Lake, Cleo Sherwood. 

There were about a dozen POVs that Lippman gives us though I guess you could say the main character is a woman named Maddie Schwartz. I just was not feeling her. She was selfish and not very engaging to follow around. The other characters are not very developed. The so called "Lady in the Lake" was a mess of a character too once things are revealed. I don't know this whole book read like a very bad mini-series that would have aired on ABC when I was a teenager. 

This takes place in Baltimore in 1966 but you honestly would not know it except for every character talking about Baltimore. I definitely thought that Lippman strayed too far with this one.

The ending was definitely a who cares from me. 

1 star, maybe 2. Have to think on the review a bit more. 

I fell off book reading this week. I was dealing with at least 3 meetings a day (1 hour plus in some cases) and having to do write-ups, follow-ups, and then reviewing my team's work. I had to sit in on 7 meetings and I purposely took on writing up 4 of them up since my team was complaining about the work they were doing. That's not counting me having to review 2 out of the 3 and completing rewriting them because they were that bad. I also take notes during all meetings and send my team my notes. One team member just sent me back the original notes I sent him so I can just posit he did not take notes. I also had to review some analysis that some of them have done....and I am just ready to not talk to anyone for the rest of the weekend. I am drinking champagne right now and regret nothing.

Here are my #FridayReads.

Lady in the Lake. I started it and am very intrigued. That said, I fell asleep reading it last night and woke up to my cat leaving me two furballs in my bed....

The Night Country. I haven't started yet. I heard mixed things about this one. I was meh on the first one so hope it is better than the first book in the series.

The Moment of Tenderness. Should be done today. I have been reading this off and on all week. The short stories are sad in tone. 

  This is an embarrassment of riches: so much so that I am immobilized in my decision-making capacity. I'll go with whatever anyone else tells me first.

This paeon to old school newspapers and journalists was touching, nostalgic, and also thrilling. The relentless hustle to put out a daily paper helps keep the suspense high in a story that stretches out a fair bit. The crimes, the business of reporting on crimes, and how little those two might intersect is a constant theme. Really I loved pretty much everything: Madeliine and Cleo, the many different types of mothers, civil rights and equal rights, the new hairstyles and clothes and fabrics of 1966. For all that is very much a crime story, it has a bit of everything except a Tracy Turnblad musical number. The Dickens comparison still feels somewhat apt.

The only other upside to having finished it (beyond the sheer pleasure of a good story well told) is that I am reluctant to start something else right away. In an effort to keep my buzz going and not bring it down on some other kind of book entirey maybe I will accomplish some of the things I was going to do in the first half of the day "as soon as I finish this chapter..."

Library copy

Shame on William Morrow and their jacket designer.

Lippman's story opens with the words of a very pretty young working-class African-American woman and mother of two, Cleo Sherman, addressing Madeline Schwartz. She's saying that no one except her mother missed her when she disappeared, "no one cared." She's telling us that Black Lives Matter and no one was going to look for her until Schwartz, a very pretty still youngish middle-class white woman and mother of one, made the disappearance into a big deal. Cleo's a realist who's endured racism her entire life.

So the cover designer took that symbolic second place in which Cleo lives and made it literal: the pretty white woman in front, clear enough, and the probably pretty woman of perhaps some color, perhaps just in shadow or a muted reflection, but sufficiently disguised that no potential white reader of Lippman need be put off.

It's possible that no one ever explicitly said "if you put a Black face on the cover, make it hard to tell." Publishers bemoan the lack of diversity on the grounds of giving the book-buying public what it wants, to which end any broad-appeal book jackets keep lead characters of color off the cover, or hide them in shadows, or use white or passes-for-white models. Only the books specifically marketed to a Black audience are overt. It's exactly the same bullshit cycle that segregates books marketed to everyone as gender neutral or overtly masculine, while slapping pink and ball gowns on anything that isn't expected to have cross-over appeal. Legally enforced segregation may be dead, but more kids now attend racially segregated schools than before integration, now imposed by school districting.

White readers have to keep demanding more diverse voices and more diverse characters and more diverse covers, because publishers will only change if they are shamed into it. All the minority voices raised in protest won't sway them, sad to say. It's just so easy to carry on passively in systems of institutional oppression and ignore the problem.

Lippman's novel addresses racism head on. Shame on William Morrow for undercutting her. I am taking a knee, at, I acknowledge, no cost at all to myself. Black Lives Matter. Keep saying it until the US acts like it's true.

Reading progress update: I've read 121 out of 352 pages.