Book Jacket:
Imagine a modern spin on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where a young couple’s undying love and the grief of a father pushed beyond sanity could spell the destruction of them all.
A string of suspicious deaths near a small Michigan town ends with a fall that claims the life of Emma Gentry’s boyfriend, Daniel. Emma is broken, a hollow shell mechanically moving through her days. She and Daniel had been made for each other, complete only when they were together. Now she restlessly wanders the town in the late Fall gloom, haunting the cemetary and its white-marbled tombs, feeling Daniel everywhere, his spectre in the moonlight and the fog.
When she encounters newcomer Alex Franks, only son of a renowned widowed surgeon, she’s intrigued despite herself. He’s an enigma, melting into shadows, preferring to keep to himself. But he is as drawn to her as she is to him. He is strangely…familiar. From the way he knows how to open her locker when it sticks, to the nickname she shared only with Daniel, even his hazel eyes with brown flecks are just like Daniel’s. The closer they become, though, the more something inside her screams there’s something very wrong with Alex Franks.
And when Emma stumbles across a grotesque and terrifying menagerie of mangled but living animals within the walls of the Franks’ estate, creatures she surely knows must have died from their injuries, she knows.
You can read an excerpt here.
Review:
This is the most non-Twilight-y Twilight-y book I have ever read – and by that I mean, yes, this is unabashedly a romance, unabashedly a story with heaps of angst and much gazing into each other’s eyes, with a girl who is torn between two boys and threatened by paranormal danger – and yet, despite all that, this book surprisingly manages to not feel like a Meyer knockoff (and not only because one of the boys is dead), and even more surprising, given my ridiculously low tolerance for emo, I found myself fully caught up in the story.
But I have to tell you, if you pick this book up hoping for a spine-tingling ode to Gothic horror, well, put the book down and back away slowly, because Mary Shelley this is not. This, folks, is a romance, with all the gazing that implies (both navel and eye-to-eye) – but to be honest what really snared me into this story were Emma’s emotions. I really, really felt for Emma – I believed her love for Daniel and pain over his death, and I was completely caught up in this broken girl’s struggle to stop clinging to her grief, to stop doing this to herself. I find that often in YA emotional fallout gets lip service but isn’t FELT, but this story really takes the time to let it land, to show us the patterns of damage across Emma’s life, and I just really enjoyed that quiet time spent in Emma’s head. (Plus in doing so the story grounds us firmly in Emma’s normal, every-day life, setting up a nice contrast for the paranormal shenanigans to come.) Bottom line, I just was pulling for Emma from the start.
As for Alex, well, he’s pretty much your typical somehow-hotter-for-being-broken YA bloke, but I liked how confused he was by his attraction to Emma, and how damaged he was in his own way. It’s admittedly a slow dance, watching Alex and Emma be drawn ever-closer to each other, but even my insta-loving-hater self was rather caught up by it all. But here’s the rub – this story is so very, very telegraphed that there is literally zero mystery about what’s going on with Alex, as in zilch. (And in case you somehow missed the jacket copy, the fact that Emma and Alex go to Shelley High pretty much spells it out.) Surprising, not so much. But I did still find myself perfectly willing to stick around until the end regardless – I guess knowing where you’re going doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the scenery along the way.
So as you’ve probably come to suspect by now, in terms of pacing this book is hardly what one can call a snappy, rip-snorting tale – but it is effective in how it plays on and around an ever looming sense of catastrophe. So while events might not be coming thick and fast, there is a fun, deliberate sense of foreboding that leads up to some nice touches of horror towards the end. (But remember folks, this is a romance above all else.)
So in the end, what to make of this book? It’s unabashedly melodramatic, to be sure, and it didn’t quite come together in the end as I’d hoped – but all in all I did still rather enjoy reading it. What can I say, I guess this is just my particular brand of angst.
Byrt Grade: B+
As Levar Burton used to say – you don’t have to take my word for it…
Think of a Twilight version of Frankenstein….that is basically this book.
Readers, don’t walk into Broken expecting monster horror. Don’t get me wrong, the teensy bit of monster horror we do get was really cool, but there wasn’t enough of it, and what little there was was drowned beneath angsty teen romance.
Leave a Reply