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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful Story, May 23, 2010
This review is from: Broken: A Novel (Paperback)
You'll recall the Biblical story of Hosea: called by God to marry a prostitute in order to demonstrate the love God has for His people and to portray in vivid detail how His people are sinning against Him. The picture we get from this comes from God's perspective. But what of the woman? What of this soul so broken that she finds it hard to love herself let alone another?
In a stunning tale of mystery, intrigue, and danger, Broken takes us on a heart-rending journey in the life of Laila, a girl whose broken past is beginning to catch up with her. Six months earlier, she'd killed a man. In her defense, it was to protect herself, but she's still haunted by the guilt. Nobody knows. Nobody. Or so she thinks. When she's discovered by a stranger who knows about her crime, and wants to make her pay, she's forced to run. But running seems to do little good. Her only chance is to accept the help of the One who can bind up the broken and make her whole again.
Each time I read a novel by Travis Thrasher, I close the cover and tell myself that was his best. But I find it hard to imagine that Thrasher is going to be able to surpass Broken easily. As the pieces fell together in the closing chapters, as the mystery became clear, as the tension heightened, as the story climaxed, as the theme hit home and began to wash over my soul...the story literally drove me to tears. And when I did close the cover, it left me in quiet and prayerful contemplation.
The writing is superb. It takes a few chapters to get used to Thrasher's use of the present tense, but it's a technique that throws the reader into the moment more than ever. Flashbacks in the form of diary entries serve to paint the background story for this broken soul. The action is intense, the pace breakneck, the aura of mystery palpable, the sense of the supernatural mysterious. But it all serves only to point to Thrasher's theme: No matter how broken, there is hope for redemption.
Broken? That's a place I've been, a place I am. Not the situation that Laila finds herself in, but I get Thrasher's message. It's his Hosea story. It's his story of all of us and how utterly broken we are and how we need the hope that can only be found in Jesus. Of how, even though we are the cause of our brokenness, He takes His broken heart and heals us with His broken body. In the vein of Isolation and Ghostwriter, Thrasher gives us Broken, one of his best stories to date.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Ripping Good Story, June 27, 2010
This review is from: Broken: A Novel (Paperback)
What a ripping good story this is.
Laila Torres works at a bank in Greenville, South Carolina. A co-worker, Kyle, is interested in her. She is clearly a beautiful woman. She keeps discouraging Kyle. He doesn't understand. He doesn't know her past. But her past is about to catch up with Laila, Kyle and just about anyone else associated with her.
And it's a past that only gradually unfolds, adding layer upon layer to Laila's story, a story that begins with one fact: she shot and killed a man.
Or did she?
The twelfth novel of author Travis Thrasher, "Broken" is a wonderfully crafted story of a woman haunted by her past, chased by the brother of the man she believes she killed, and pursued by her own conscience. The story moves from Chicago to New York to Greenville and finally to post-Katrina New Orleans, the perfect "broken" setting for a broken woman running from a broken life. Thrasher sustains the growing tension of the story by allowing Laila herself to finally face what she's truly been running from, what she cannot forgive herself for but only can be supernaturally forgiven.
"Broken" is a great story. Thrasher has written a series of suspenseful, sometimes terrifying but always satisfying and even provocative stories, and this one is one of his best.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Creepy. Confusing. Not for me, May 19, 2010
This review is from: Broken: A Novel (Paperback)
"Broken" was...surreal. Weird. Creepy. Depressing. Not to mention disjointed and confusing. It's a fast-paced suspense novel, but it was hard to be worried when I sometimes had no idea what was going on. I'd actually call "Broken" a horror novel. The author mixed nightmares, reality, and supernatural until I wasn't sure what was happening. Granted, the author was probably trying to make the reader feel what it was like inside Laila's head, but for much of the novel we're not really in her head but at a distance watching things unfold.
The author also introduced new characters without telling us how they related to other characters, where they were, or why they were acting in the mysterious way they were. Sometimes he gave full names but no connections, but other times he hid the character's identity, too. An author can get away with a little of this, but this happened so much that I felt confused most of the time. Ironically, though, I still did guess the "surprise twist" before it was revealed.
All that said, the characters dealt with realistic problems and were realistic enough. I only really liked one of the characters, though, and I'm angry at the author for what he did to this character.
Most of the novel had a "supernatural" theme rather than a Christian one since spooky supernatural events were the focus. Laila rejected God because she believed that He didn't care about her--if He even existed. And, if He did, then He wouldn't want anything to do with her anyway because of all the bad choices and sins in her past. A Christian message was worked into the last few chapters, though, as Laila thought over things she experienced and things she believed now but still struggled to accept.
The novel was written in third person, present tense ("Laila goes to the door") which read awkwardly. There was some swearing and cussing. There was no explicit sex or gore. Overall, this novel just didn't work for me.
I received this book as an advanced readers copy from the publisher.
Reviewed by Debbie from Genre Reviews
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