My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Broken Lives Pieced Back Together
This was a book club selection that received a luke warm review from our group of ten. I, however, was one of the few who truly enjoyed reading Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos.
While many felt elements of the plot were too contrived—and they were—for me it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the story, and particularly from the entertaining and well-developed characters.
This is a unique story. It made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me angry. Anything that can evoke this much emotion is, to me, WORTH the read.
Broken For You is about Margaret, a woman near the end of her life in Seattle, Washington, who comes to terms with the circumstances that enabled her to inherit a fortune and preside over a precarious collection of artifacts. When she is diagnosed with a brain tumor, she finds a way to solve her personal puzzles and her lifelong dilemma of housing glass/ceramic/porcelain objects that were confiscated from European Jews during the Nazi regime.
The first thing Margaret does is take-in a boarder, a young woman named Wanda. They are both in a sense, “broken,” and together they find a way to resolve their personal issues. Through art and the creation of a surrogate family, they bond and their stories unfold.
That’s just a brief summation . . . but it’s worth reading every page to understand how they get to resolution—the unusual and even aggravating way they do it—and to meet the unique characters that play a role along the way.
Well written, original and I highly recommend.
1 comment:
Hey Michelle! I really enjoyed Broken for You--I read it a few years ago and I still think about it every now and then. Strong, interesting, unusual characters made for a good read!
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