Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Broken, by Daniel Clay

The Story: On the back of the book, it says that it was inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird, that it explores similar issues in modern times.

The story starts with this girl, Skunk, witnessing a neighbor, Bob Oswald, just beating the snot out of another neighbor, Rick Buckley, who is known as Broken.  Come to find out, one of Bob’s slutty daughters has falsely accused Broken of raping her and this was his response.  The rest of the book follows Broken’s slow unraveling as well as the antics of Skunk’s family.  She and her brother Jed and their friend Dillion become a little bit obsessed with what has happened to Broken.  Meanwhile all these different stories are playing out around them- Skunk’s dad, Archie, is sleeping with their help, who is dating Skunk’s teacher… that kind of thing.

The whole book is just these stories playing out, often told from Skunk’s point of view as she is in the hospital in a coma.

What I Thought: I wanted to like this book so, so much.  The cover is beautiful.  To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my all time favorite books.  I love family dramas. In short, this seemed like a dream book for me.

I think that the problem I found was that the author spent too much time trying to think of clever names that coincided with the classic and missed the heart of it.  This book, while it tried, was totally void of the guts that made To Kill a Mockingbird great.  It was more  of a “neighborhood drama,” while the reason To Kill a Mockingbird has endured the test of time is that it explores deep, social issues.

So maybe the real issue is that this author invited, in his first novel, very direct comparisons to one of America’s best loved books.

The other issue, for me, was the lack of chapters.  It was just one long, spewed story.  I read in the author info that he usually writes for magazines and does short stories.  While this technique may work there, a novel (unless it is very short) just needs broken up.  I was also uncomfortable with how he’d switch stories/points of view without even switching paragraphs.  It just made everything seem choppy instead of developing a good flow.

I’m not even going to go into how “British” this book is and how a few times I had to go to the computer and look up a word to see what it meant.  That would just show my ignorance, right?

All that being said, the “mystery” part of the book was pretty intriguing.  I wanted to know what was going to happen with Skunk (which, if I haven’t said already, is the worst character name ever) and with Broken.  Knowing from the onset that Skunk is in a coma really put me on edge because I knew that that was what the book was leading up to.  That suspense is what kept me reading, and I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed with this part of the book.

Conclusion: Meh. I don’t know.  I would say if you can separate the To Kill a Mockingbird comparisons from the story itself, you may be able to really enjoy this story a lot.  I couldn’t.  I still got a little something out of it, but it won’t make my re-read list.