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47 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep us all together.", October 7, 2005
This review is from: Half Broken Things (Hardcover)
Jean, a sixty-four-year-old spinster, is working her final job as a house-sitter before she retires, tending the lovely, large Walden Manor, not far from Bath. The owners, who will be in Europe from January through August, have locked certain rooms, attested to the inventory, and established rules governing what can and cannot be done on the premises. Knowing this is her last job, Jean decides to flout the rules, living as if she were truly the lady of the manor, opening locked rooms, the wine cellar and freezer, and the family's personal spaces. Within a week, she has invited her "son" Michael to move in, and he has brought with him the pregnant Steph, who is about to give birth. Bonding into a close-knit "family," these social outcasts make themselves at home--for the first time in their lives.
Jean, writing a first person narrative at the end of her stay, instantly creates suspense when she reveals that there are "only eleven more days," and that she "does not plan to offer excuses for what we have done." Through flashbacks, we come to know her family background, learning of her childhood, her psychological and emotional abuse, her dysfunctional relationship with her demanding Mother, and her need for closeness. Michael, her "son," now "working" as a thief, is similarly needy, having survived an equally horrific childhood. Steph, the third lost soul, is an abused teenager--pregnant, rejected, and homeless.
The characters, though off-beat when taken separately, become absurd when they start behaving as a family. Living apart from society's rules, they begin acting to protect themselves and their lifestyle at Walden Manor. Jean speaks for all when she says, "I would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep us all together," and the reader has reason to believe her.
As the characters' self-protective actions become more extreme, the novel changes from suspenseful psychological horror to the blackest of black-humored farce--some of the darkest humor I've read since Molly Keane's Time After Time. Joss has filled the novel with minute descriptions of her odd characters in the novel's early pages, creating chilling suspense while stimulating reader empathy with the characters. In the second half of the novel, however, the reader realizes that these characters are more than just "odd," as they engage in increasingly outrageous scenes. The pace accelerates, and the author's mordant humor is fully unleashed.
Coincidences, ironies, understatements, and absurdity combine as Joss guides the novel into that twilight zone between genuine suspense and genuine humor, keeping the reader smiling from the tenterhooks. The novel's themes of time, family, home, and the need for love are fully developed--in unique, unexpected, and darkly humorous ways. n Mary Whipple
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful and haunting, October 5, 2005
This review is from: Half Broken Things (Hardcover)
What desperate lengths would you go to for love --- especially if you've been forever deprived of it? This provocative question --- and its potentially disturbing ramifications --- is the explosive kindling that ignites a slow-burning fire engulfing the three bereft souls in HALF BROKEN THINGS. In this dark psychological thriller, awarded a prestigious Silver Dagger Award by the Crime Writers' Association, Scottish author Morag Joss explores the bottomless depths of human loneliness when the lives of three incongruous misfits collide in the British countryside.
On the surface, Jean, Michael and Steph appear to share little in common other than marginalized lives and childhoods marked by abandonment, abuse and disillusionment. Sixty-four-year-old housesitter Jean has forged a meager and solitary existence out of watching over the beloved possessions of others during their absences. Meanwhile, friendless and penniless loner Michael is reduced to stealing religious artifacts from churches in order to subsist on canned soup in a dingy, freezing apartment.
In a fated encounter, he crosses paths with the pregnant and jobless young Steph at the exact moment her lifelong inertia suddenly gives way to an impulsive decision to flee her abusive boyfriend. Short on options, she foists herself on the nearest person at hand, who happens to be Michael. Preoccupied with his own dire circumstances, he reluctantly acquiesces into letting her settle into his apartment and eventually into his heart.
Meanwhile, Jean faces the specter of mandatory retirement after her current eight-month contract ends housesitting the stately Walden Manor. The bleak prospect of being put out to pasture weakens her grip on reality and she indulgently assumes proxy ownership of the house, taking inappropriate liberties with its possessions. But even this misguided attempt to achieve a sense of belonging is not enough to stave off her emptiness, so she invents a son whom she'd given up for adoption and places an advertisement seeking to find him.
When Michael, given up for adoption by a mother he never knew, chances upon the ad, the wheels of fate are set again in motion. Though he realizes immediately upon meeting Jean that she cannot be his mother, the desperation of both supercedes reality and this implicit acknowledgment forms the basis for their surrogate family. Walden Manor draws Michael and Steph in with welcoming and bountiful arms, providing much-needed sustenance and a respite from their hand-to-mouth financial struggles. Insulated from the pressures of the outside world, the incongruous new family creates an idyllic-seeming existence until reality slowly and inexorably intercedes.
The gradual unraveling of their elaborately concocted fantasy world is accelerated by the unexpected appearance of someone from Michael's past and the impending return of the rightful owners of Walden Manor. These encroaching threats set in motion a dramatic and irrevocable chain of events that hurtles the novel toward its final shocking crescendo.
The carefully calibrated manner in which the author allows events to unfold creates an ominous and pervasive tension as she descends us into greater and greater depths of suspense and disbelief with each turn of the page. Equally as skillful, Joss manages to make each increasingly appalling occurrence appear frighteningly justifiable given the circumstances. Just as she crafts a narrative that both defies belief yet seems completely plausible, she uses that same gifted sleight of hand on her characters, who simultaneously repel us by their desperate actions while also inspiring empathy and even likeability.
While Morag Joss has written three previously well-received books in her Sara Selkirk mystery series, HALF BROKEN THINGS is her first stand-alone effort and it firmly cements her reputation as a master of psychological suspense on par with Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell. Her ability to penetrate deep into the hearts, minds and motivations of her characters enables her to portray the doomed inevitability of their half-broken lives to powerful and haunting effect.
--- Reviewed by Joni Rendon
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The house from the very first made me feel things, which perhaps I should find strange", December 9, 2005
This review is from: Half Broken Things (Hardcover)
Jean has been searching for love for most of her life. Adopted as a child and raised by a calculating and uncaring mother, Jean is the first to admit that her world has been full of missed opportunities. She's never travelled, never learnt how to drive, has never married, and now spends most her time looking after upscale mansions whilst the owners are away on extended holidays.
Jean seems to live in a perpetual dreamlike state, hovering somewhere between a vague though sapping sense of regret and a sort of grudging acceptance of her lot. She enjoys her job as a house sitter, reveling in the quietness and solitude; she even expects to go on to mind other houses. But when she gets a call from the house-sitting agency coldly informing her that this job managing the grand Walden Manor with be her last, she's absolutely devastated.
The agency thinks it's about time that Jean retired, she's getting just to old to do the job, they're even more anxious to get rid of her when they discover that she has accidentally broken an antique teapot. The news causes Jean to gradually withdraw from the outside world, and she suddenly starts imagining the house as hers, eating all the stored food, wearing the owners' clothes, and enjoying full use of the rooms and contents, even though this has been strictly forbidden by the agency.
Aching for love, Jean invents a son and places an adding the local paper in the hope that he will contact her. When Michael, a petty thief, and small time swindler, who also comes from a damaged childhood, answers it, Jean is overwhelmed with happiness and she chooses to smudge the facts that Michael is probably not really her son. Michael also arrives with the heavily pregnant Steph, dumped by her abusive boyfriend; Steph is an uneducated drifter whom Michael has picked up at a petrol station.
Jean, Michael and Steph are all damaged goods: Michael with the exposure of his squalid life, the absence of friends and prospects, Steph, who has found herself inhabiting places whose surfaces she could not soften and whose depths would not admit her, and Jean, who felt that the house from the very first made her feel things which perhaps she should find strange, but together secluded in this house they find a kind of peace, forming a type of family.
Author Morag Joss, writes a provocative and dark tale of love and deceit. Unfortunately, this trio is living on borrowed time, the owners eventually intending to return. Jean, Michael, and Steph are not only deceiving those around them, but are also intent on self-deception. The fact that Michael and Steph have no right to be at the manor because Jean herself is only temporary, and transient belongs in the end nowhere. But as long as everything remains unsaid it could be deemed not to be happening, "It could remain untrue for as long as they did not draw attention to it."
Joss writes delicately of time and place, using the city of Bath and its surrounds to her sinister advantage, her protagonists caught up in an emotional dilemma, from which they cannot control. Walden manor is indeed awash in silvery light and secrecy, "where time itself has stopped passing." Jean, Michael, and Steph caught up in a familiaral intensity; and the sense of danger and the discovery, once it strikes, is pervasive and ultimately catastrophic.
These are characters living on the edge, their days numbered, with this house weaving itself in and among them "gathering them all in towards itself and to one another." Half Broken Things is a psychologically complex and menacing tale of descent into unfamiliar territory, a kind of quasi sanity; the trio find themselves blindsided by events, violence rushing in, forever altering their perceptions of the world. Mike Leonard December 05.
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