Customer Reviews

Broken Colors

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Sophie Marks is an artist who has experienced many tragedies in her life, all of which have affected her ability to experience pure love. She spends her toddler years in England after losing both her parents. As a college student during the Blitz of War II, she loses everyone else who is close to her. Even in her years as a mature artist, she suffers--unable to trust, unable to talk about the depths of her sorrow, and unable to open herself completely. Living a life that often consists of "broken colors," Sophie sometimes fails to recognize what is pure and true and fails to see that she herself sometimes creates the "broken colors" which muddy the palette of her own life.

Author Michele Zackheim develops Sophie's emotional and creative life from her early childhood until she is a woman of eighty, as she struggles, first, to become a successful artist, primarily of portraits, and second, to become a successful person, one who is an independent thinker but who is open to love. It is the "love" part which is the most difficult for her. Sometimes confusing love and sex, she makes mistakes, "loving" the wrong person, trusting lovers who excite her but whom she truly does not know, and finally experiencing real love but taking it for granted until it is too late. Or is it?

Zackheim brings this novel to life by recreating the intensity of the artistic experience--what drives the artist, how the artist sees the world and captures a vision on canvas, the choices each artist makes as s/he allows an inner vision to come to life, and how the artist's own life affects what s/he sees and reveals in his/her work. An acclaimed artist herself, before becoming a writer, Zackheim writes with the color and emotional fervor of a painter, creating a canvas of words which bring Sophie to life just as Sophie's portraits bring her own subjects to life.

As Sophie moves from England to Italy and the American Southwest, and then returns late in life to the scenes of her childhood in England and a place where she experienced happiness in Italy, the reader moves with her, grieving and loving as she does, empathizing with her pain and her triumphs, and hoping that she will make choices which allow her to grow and flourish. Hers is a vibrant, passionate life, described here in vibrant, passionate language. Responding to the world viscerally, Sophie lives on the edge, both personally and professionally. When as an old woman she finally comes to terms with her "broken colors," the reader hopes as much as Sophie does that she will finally see life and love in pure, true color. n Mary Whipple

Violette's Embrace
Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl
Biography - Zackheim, Michele (1941-): An article from: Contemporary Authors Online

I read this almost in a single sitting - bought it one afternoon, started that night, resumed the next morning, first at the breakfast table, then at a cafe, finally in a park by the river. What a wonderful story - epic, yet somehow like a series of small paintings... I am curious how many of the techniques are ones the author has used (her bio says she is also a visual artist), how many invented or imagined. And the endless balancing act, for an artist, of the need for solitude and the need for love - so real, as is the drive to come full circle. Beautifully written - I look forward to re-reading it.

I loved them way she describes the processes of making art, a rarity in literature.
The whole, long story of the life of a woman artist moved me, sometimes to tears. Zackheim felt the character's story deeply, and told it beautifully.
Joyce Kozloff

Broken Colors is the novel of a talented female artist who must come to grips with the difficult realities of life. Born in England during the first world war and raised by her bohemian grandparents, Sophie Marks learns how to pour her soul into works of art; yet creativity alone cannot bring her fulfillment. After the terrible devastation of the second world war, she flees to Paris and tries to start over. She forms a relationship with a talented Italian sculptor; yet after years pass, what they had gradually crumbles away. She takes flight again, this time to the American Southwest. Brilliant yet isolated, it takes the arrival of someone from her former life to spur her to confront memories of her childhood in England and seek love renewed amid her maturity. Emotional, passionate, and introspective, Broken Colors is the one-of-a-kind tale of a shining life's multifaceted journey.

This portrait depicts Sophie, an aspiring artist growing up in the interwar period in Europe. The novel however spans several decades and two continents with a vivid sense of place and time. A moving tale of what it takes to make it in the art world, Broken Colors is a must read for young artists. However, most any reader may identify with Sophie's personal sacrifice, determination and spirit.

A novel with little story and even less character development. The only thing that kept me going was the author's frequent references to art and the ideas of an artist's life.

I could not put this book down as it was a fascinating journey with Sophie the main character of the story. It follows her life from childhood to her aging years and never lets you down with its visual imagery and heartfelt words. A must read.

it should have been 100 pages shorter as in the last third it just rambled around and around.

There is something about the days of an artist that differ from the days of others. This book examines that phenomenon within the prism of colors. It is wistful, yet glorious. Urgent , yet spacious.

LIBRARY JOURNAL "This is a beautiful novel, sometimes comic and always wise. Visual artist Zackheim imbues the novel with her deep knowledge of the art world, from techniques to agents to the world of galleries."

BOOKLIST. "With soaring lyricism, Zackheim limns an exquisitely haunting portrait of an indelibly scarred, yet deeply passionate, woman."