Broken for You

Rating:
Summary: A life-affirming read from a promising debut novelist
Review: "Well, it's a rather trite question, I suppose, but if you found out that you had only a short while to live, maybe a year or two, how would you spend your time?" Upon hearing she has a malignant brain tumor, 75-year-old Margaret Hughes poses this question to a young woman working the counter at a café in BROKEN FOR YOU, the first novel by Stephanie Kallos. The young woman replies that she would do what scares her most --- to do the opposite of what she's always done. Margaret decides that is exactly what she must do. She must challenge herself by opening herself up to people --- no more playing it safe.

She starts by literally opening her palatial Seattle house to boarders. The first one to apply is stage director Wanda Schultz, a diminutive young woman who came to Seattle on the trail of her boyfriend who left her. Despite her hectic schedule at the theater, Wanda is using her spare time trying to track down her runaway boyfriend, convinced that once he sees her he'll want her back. Poor Wanda also harbors resentment towards her parents for abandoning her at such a young age, to live her life in an overcrowded house with her eight cousins. Ignorant of Margaret's condition, she is intrigued to live in such an elaborate and roomy home.

Margaret's mansion is adorned with thousands of beautiful porcelain pieces, most gathered by her late father on trips abroad when she was a child. As part of her reinvention, she decides to jettison some of the pieces --- not by selling them, but through the therapeutic act of breaking them (and further into the book, we learn why Margaret wants to rid herself of these artifacts). After Wanda suffers an unfortunate accident and is rendered housebound, she learns that she is quite adept at not only breaking the pieces superbly but also at gluing them back together, mixing and matching types of clay to form a totally different treasure.

Kallos cleverly uses the metaphor of broken porcelain to represent the wounded people in this novel. Each one is trying to reassemble themselves as best they can, hopefully being reshaped into something better. The characters are real and relatable, and never once succumb to self-pity, no matter what hand life has dealt them. Told in alternating chapters that illuminate the characters as they are now, we also are privy to their back-stories of how they came to be "broken." With such insight into these people, BROKEN FOR YOU ends up being a life-affirming read rather than a depressing one.

--- Reviewed by Bronwyn Miller


Rating:
Summary: Dazzling first novel by a born storyteller
Review: Broken for You is the best first novel I've read since Nancy Clark's The Hills at Home, which it resembles in being about a family, although a very different kind of family (or maybe not so different).

It's hard to believe this is a first novel, because Kallos writes with the accomplishment of a much more experienced writer. In less skillful hands, the events of her narrative could seem like unbelievable coincidence, but Kallos makes them feel right and inevitable. And she strikes just the right tone throughout, avoiding the trap of cutesiness into which a lesser writer could all too easily have fallen, in telling this story. I look forward to her next book.

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully written and hopeful book
Review: I just finished this book and have a big smile on my face. Stephanie Kallos writes with creativity, humor, beauty and raw emotion. I loved this book.

For the reviewer who thought that there were too many coincidences and the ending was too contrived: if you read this book literally that is true. I took it to be more of a statement about redemption and saw Kallos using these characters as illustrations about love, loss, family, guilt, and ultimately salvation.

I would highly recommend this book. I can't wait for her next one.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written But Disappointing
Review: I would give the first half of this book 5 stars. Stephanie Kallos is a talented writer, and I found myself caught up the story to the point that I didn't want to put the book down.

And then I got past Part One. And that's when my troubles with this novel began.

Summary, no spoilers:

Margaret is a wealthy woman and she lives alone in a huge house with many valuable antiques. She seems to have an almost unnatural attachment and devotion to them.

Wanda is a 30+ single woman with a mysterious past who comes and rents a room from Margaret, after Margaret discovers that she has brain tumor and decides to take in tenants.

The story goes back and forth between the lives and the pasts of these two interesting women.

As I said, up until the midway point of this book, I thought this was a terrific tale. But then many incredible coincidences start to pile up, and the story became too manipulative for my taste.

By book's end, I found myself wanting to fling this book away. Even though I found it so disappointing, I gave it 4 stars, because there is some beautiful writing, and because it started off so well.

Well written, but ultimately a frustrating read.

Rating:
Summary: "Today" Show Book Club choice
Review: On Tuesday (12/14/04), Ms. Kallos was interviewed on the "Today" show and introduced by Sue Monk Kid (SECRET LIFE OF BEES). Ms. Kid spoke elequently of BROKEN FOR YOU, comparing it to her own work, calling it "full of heart and hope" and "genuinely funny...with everything in it from Nazi intrigue to bowling." Ms. Kid could not have been more right, the "Today" show could not have made a better selection for their Book Club, and no reader of quality literary fiction should go without reading this one. Treat yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Book of the Year
Review: Stephanie Kallos has written the undiscovered best book of the year. I am a voracious reader of quality fiction from books like Middlesex, The Outside World, What Was She Thinking, The Other Boelyn Girl, Reading Lolita in Tehran, etc. The story is woven in such a heartfelt, subtle way, that the reader not only can't stop turning the pages but is always surprised at what comes next. A book with spontaneous tears at the end, not because the ending is so happy but because the messages are so endearing and hopeful.

Rating:
Summary: a fairy tale
Review: This book was recommended to me by the staff of our local bookstore. I read the first chapter, was intrigued, and bought it. It was said to be about the relationship between an elderly woman and a 30-something woman. Actually, it spans post-Holocaust guilt and survival, families breaking apart, cancer, and mental illness. However, this is not a dark book! The writing is laugh-out-loud funny and the story is, basically, a fairy tale. I'm sad to be done with it. Looking forward to Stephanie Kallos' next effort.

Rating:
Summary: Life in America, in a Sad State.
Review: This debut novel (can't understand why it took her seven years to finish it unless it was particularly painful and personal -- most first books are to some degree) is about broken things, broken people (misfits in today's world), broken hearts, broken lives, broken glasses at a Jewish wedding, broken dishes after a funeral meal; the flap calls it "a glorious homage to the beauty of broken things."

Things can be mended, most times, but how do you heal a broken heart when all your dreams and memories are smashed to smitterens? She uses a quote from the Jewish Prayer of Concentration: "He took Bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you (what would Lynn Truss say about all those commas?).

After Wanda has gotten what she felt she deserved, she reminisces: look at what you value and hold dear.Objects first, because they are endowed by your memories as "sentimental value." Sentiment is defined as ascribing a value to something above and beyond what its value is to God. There is an expression, "the object of my affections." She quotes from songs such as Blues In the Night, The Nearness of You, April in Paris, and Shall We Dance.

About faces: she thinks that the beauty of those you love comes not from the smoothness of skin or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience which has left it mark. Apparently this is about Margaret, the old woman who took brokenhearted Wanda in and bequeathed on her a home and a life. Margaret reminds me of the old woman in 'Walking Across Egypt.'

Close families don't exist today and we have to make up surrogate families just to survive. That's a sad state of affairs in America, as the young are too busy doing their own thing and spending money as fast as they can make it.

Seven years is a long time to dwell on sad things, broken or otherwise. But now, she has a place in the library just for her under the K section. That's something to be proud of and share with those youngsters who will grow up and away before she can turn around. Enjoy them while they are young, as there will never be another time such as that. They too may become broken, as time goes by.

Rating:
Summary: The necessity of Brokenness
Review: While the theme is not new, the presentation is invitingly so. Never to be broken means never to become more, never to be shared, never to be transformed. This offers a grand infusion of hope for our fragmented world and a much needed lesson on repairing the relationships with self and others that seem shattered beyond repair.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful novel
Review: Yes, much of the plot is contrived, but the characters, relationships and emotions read as true as the best fiction I've read. This is a tale of how people experience damage (as anyone who lives will) and, through being damaged, learn to find what is truly valuable in others and themselves.