Reporting Lives

by DebraPickett

Reporting Lives <> Paperback <> DebraPickett <> KeithPublicationsLLC

310 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2014

Reviews

[Philip Carroll · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Reporting Lives' is Debra Picket's fiction debut. She is a long-time writer and award-winning reporter/columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. In 2004-5 she made a series of trips to East Africa to cover the response of the Chicago philanthropic community to the AIDS pandemic and subsequent orphan crisis there. While there, she began developing the idea for this book, which is largely based on her experiences.

'Reporting Lives' tells the story of Sara Simone, a twenty-something single woman and reporter for a local Chicago television channel. She is tall, attractive, and emotionally crippled. As a reporter she's intelligent, intuitive, and extremely confident to the point of narcissism. We never learn if her emotional unavailability is due to a tragic family accident which occurred during her college years. She does mention feeling some guilt for choosing not to accompany her parents on their tragic journey, though the author never ties that into Sara's inability to commit to a relationship or open up honestly to friends or co-workers. Perhaps her behavior is a result of parental unavailability, as she was raised by two highly successful and driven professional parents.

Regardless, it is this lack of human connectivity which sets her up for a fall on an assignment which has lead her to the slums outside Nairobi, Kenya.

After a bus load of Kenyan exchange students die in a fiery crash on a Chicago freeway, Sara is sent to Nairobi to get video of the families' reactions to the loss of their children and brothers. Sara has the unique ability to draw out this type of story. Things don't go as planned and she spends two months traveling the countryside--not quite breaking through her own emotional walls to find meaning to the abject poverty all around Kenya, and the root of her uncharacteristic response to it.

While Sara seems to wander through the story, passively bouncing from point to point--even her crisis in the Mathare slums seemed randomly inexplicable, out of character, and lacking remarkable impact--the strength of the author's prose and African experiences come forward to win the day.

Descriptions of Nairobi and later at a hotel near a game preserve came alive for me. I had spent a few years in South Africa during its financially independent and economically robust period during apartheid, working in the townships of Soweto, Chatsworth, and others of the Bantu Tribes and mixed races. Then, returning decades later to find a struggling economy with many of the opulent hotels and businesses in disrepair, or boarded up, many of the scenes described in this novel were particularly poignant. There, in the hotels and restaurants, is where we meet the many characters which make this story grandly diverse.

Though Sara Simone never came alive to me as an empathetic and active character, many of the secondary characters did. Trisha, Simon, Vince, even Mr. Handleburg, and many more all came to life with depth and personality. Finally, Ms. Picket's skill with word craft brought the scenes to life--from a horrific accident on a rain-slick Chicago freeway to the desolation of the Nairobi slums, and the marginal existence of post colonial, and post embassy bombing, Kenyan tourism.

This book is beautifully written with only a handful of typos and two point of view shifts. James bothered me. A guy who seemed human and caring did a 180 degree character shift in Africa. I realize that Sara had to be abandoned in Kenya for her to fall effectively into the plot. I don't think the author handled it convincingly.

However, it was Sara that dragged the story down from what could have been four stars. Her character was only marginally active. Instead of growing from her experiences she fell back on her narcissism and emotional defensiveness to control challenging situations, and those around her. Ms. Picket truly "Reported the Lives" of the people in this story, but a story leaves me flat if I read 370 pages and the main character doesn't grow.

[Bonnieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sara is a news reporter for WMAQ TV, Chicago, who is the first on the site of a horrendous truck-bus crash on the Eisenhower Expressway. 12 young boys, Kenyans in the states to attend a Chicago charter school, die in this crash. As a reporter known for her ability to talk with families after tragedy strikes them, Sara immediately attempts to follow up on the story by seeking the sponsoring families, only to find that not one of these families has anything to say. The school itself is run by Kwame Shaw, a Chicago ‘player’ and activist. As the boys’ bodies lie in the morgue, with no families to claim them and no information about any of them, the station sends Sara to Nairobi with a camera man to do the kind of story at which she is so good…family follow-up to human tragedy. In a short space at the beginning of the story, Pickett does a nice job of providing the reader a good sense of who Sara is prior to this jumping off point for the real story.

And here the real story begins…the story of Sara, a driven, achievement-oriented woman who lost her own parents when she was a late teen; of love and life amidst the incredible poverty of Mehare, the Nairobi slum and the Kenyan rural countryside; the universe of differences between Kenya and Chicago; the emerging terrorist politics of the region.

Pickett is equally adept at engaging the reader in the human story and the context within which the story of finding and becoming oneself is set, both in Chicago and in Kenya. This reader finished the book feeling like I had a sense of the geography of Nairobi as well as the rural parts of Kenya. I was able to see the characters at the Impala, the old Safari lodge in the middle of nowhere that reeked of old empirical architecture, habits, and behaviors. I could see, feel and smell the Nairobi slum. And I could smile at the laughter, hope, and love also found there. Picket painted a clear picture of all.

Pickett has a great cast of characters in this story, with none turned into caricatures, which she could have easily done. She also leaves just enough mystery about the characters and about the future of Sara at the end of the story. Some readers will be disappointed with the ending; I liked it.

How great it is also to read a story that successfully includes the greed and corruption of Chicago politics with the beauty of the people and country of Kenya, while not letting the reader forget the potential of international terrorism? That is what this book does and that is just the context for the human story that keeps the reader engaged. Pickett manages to do all of this as she weaves a story of a young adult coming to grips with what it means to be human.

Debra Pickett has written an engaging, well-written, first novel. I personally cannot wait for her to write another.

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through a journalist's eyes

Wisconsin author Debra Pickett takes advantage of her background in journalism, both in print and in television, and places a story before us that is multilayered, technically finessed, immediate and from the vantage that only a person with the mind of reportage experience could manage.

Even the manner in which this book is presented graphically (I was sent the paperback version which is superb) - the paragraphs set in brief and succinct fashion the way a fine piece of print journalism should appear - this book breathes internalized knowledge. The story, according to the author, is based on her experience as a Chicagoan reporter following a major news story to Nairobi, Kenya and having her perspective changed forever. And despite the fact that this book is fiction, that is exactly how this reader is affected - changed.

Briefly, to get the plot out of the way, `Television journalist Sara Simone has just landed a huge story, the one she's sure will propel her from her local news job in Chicago straight to a network anchor chair. But, when her reporting takes her to the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, she finds herself unable to maintain her usual cool distance from tragedy. Her great talent, getting grieving relatives on camera, doing those wretched "how do you feel?" interviews, seems not just inadequate, but actually wrong. So, instead of doing her job, she walks away, soon finding herself quite literally directionless. Desperate to get out of the slums, she climbs on board the first bus she sees and winds up at an old safari lodge in the Rift Valley. The colonial relic feels, at first, like a haven of respite, a quiet place to figure things out and plan her next move. Can she salvage the career she abandoned in the slums? Does she even want to? Living a life, she soon discovers, can be far more complicated than merely reporting about one.'

That synopsis pares the tale down to the essentials, but it is the emotional impact of what happens to Sara Simone is almost a confessional that (hopefully) most journalist encounter. How do you place yourself in a position of tragedy and remain cold enough to translate that sight and emotion into printed words or televised versions? It is something many of us have wondered, especially having been in the Vietnam War and encountered journalists gathering data for the back home newspapers or the television programs.

There are many poignant lessons to learn here, and that is because Debra Pickett even on her debut novel gives notice of a brilliant writer to watch. Highly Recommended.

[R.W. Lang · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of Chicago television reporter, Sara Simone, whose dream is to move up to a network; or is it? When a busload of African exchange students die in a vehicular crash, Sara is sent to Nairobi, Kenya to interview their families. Appalled by the conditions of the slum Mathare, she gives up and drifts through Kenya. After surviving a disaster, Sara goes back to Mathare and finishes the story, uncovering corruption and drug trafficking. Now, what does she do? Pickett delivers in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but in a voice that is clearly her own.

[K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won a free copy from the Goodreads First Reads Giveaway Program and think that it interesting. I would recommend it to everyone.