Customer Reviews

Split

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4 star:		(7)
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When his abusive father kicks him out for having the audacity to fight back, 16-year-old Jace Witherspoon has only one place to go--his older brother Christian in New Mexico. From Chicago to Albuquerque is not an easy trip, particularly if you have only recently gotten your license and don't have money, but Jace goes with the faith that his brother will take him in.

You see, Christian ran away several years ago and has found a new life for himself. Having lived through their father's abuse, Christian knows exactly what Jace is going through.

Unfortunately, two abused kids do not necessarily make the best roommates. They've got a lot of trauma, secrets, and bitterness to live through. They do have help from Christian's English teacher girlfriend, Mirriam, and Jace's co-worker, Dakota.

Can they ever feel safe from their Dad? And can they get their Mom, who they both fear is going to be killed by their father away?

"Split" is a compelling read from the first line to the breathless end. While the story's not a thriller per se, this relationship novel definitely had me on the edge of my seat all the way til three AM. This is an excellent book for older young adults and even adult readers will enjoy the finely-drawn characterization and heart-pounding pacing.

Rebecca Kyle, January 2010

Swati Avasthi's SPLIT is that rare bird in YA literature: a classic character study that moves you to turn the pages as quickly as a plot book would. Here we have a 16-year-old kid named Jace who's on the run from a house of domestic violence. His dad, a respected judge by day, beats his wife silly, while his second punching bag -- Jace's older brother, Christian, has fled Chicago for New Mexico. When Jace tries to intercede for his mother one day, he, too, comes to blows against the monster. That's when he decides to split. That's when he reluctantly abandons his mother and follows his brother to New Mexico.

Avasthi has done her homework. You will learn a lot about why women stay with abusive men and what happens to children of men who hit -- and it will all be shown through dialogue and actions, not lecturing or finger-wagging. Jace and Christian, each with his own demons, try to start a new life as roommates, but Christian has buried his demons under a cloak of silence and long, therapeutic runs across the New Mexican landscape, while Jace must deal with worse torments -- the sins of the father visited on his own persona. With an incredible temper, he has an additional memory to deal with. The memory of grabbing his Chicago girlfriend by the throat one night when he was angry.

This intelligent book has universal appeal. Boys will enjoy the brothers angle and Jace's point of view as he tries to fit in to his new New Mexico high school and the varsity soccer team. Girls will enjoy the strong women in this tale. Christian's girlfriend, Mirriam, is a young teacher trying first to help Christian and then Jace to negotiate the rapids of their unique, yet similar psychological whitewaters. And, while stealing at a bookstore, Jace is captivated by the clerk, Dakota, who catches him in the act. He eventually lands a job there and finds Dakota equal to his wiles and intolerant of his nonsense.

When all is said and done, you'll hate to say goodbye to this foursome. What's more, their efforts to rescue their mother back home while avoiding the beast (a father who hopes to track their location down) will both intrigue and horrify you. SPLIT teaches, entertains, and fascinates with its raw energies. Highly recommended.

"The envelope says 4B. Even though 4B is labeled MARSHALL, I press the button, and the buzz echoes in the tiny foyer. Answer. Be home and answer.
"Outside, a FedEx truck roars, pauses, and roars again. Its white profile steals away, leaving only a gasp of gray exhaust. A shrunken man drags the door open and holds it for his shrunken wife. Before they even step over the threshold, they see me and stop.
"I am quite the picture. The split lip isn't the only relandscaping my father has done. A purple mountain is rising on my jaw, and a red canyon cuts across my forehead.
"They stare at me, and I suck in my lip, hiding what I can.
"At the moment, a distorted voice comes through the speaker: 'Who is it?'
"Can I really have this conversation over a speaker? Remember me? The brother you left behind? Well, I've caught up. Even in my imagination, I stop here. I leave out the rest.
"'Um,' I say, 'FedEx.'
"The couple unfreezes. The man grasps his wife's elbow, tugs her outside, shoves the door closed, and helps her hobble away. Great way to start my Albuquerque tenure; scaring the locals."

Sixteen year-old Jace Witherspoon will be changing his last name to MARSHALL, and creating himself a new identity just like his big brother Christian did. Five years ago, toward the end of his high school years, Christian disappeared from home and school and Jace has not seen or heard from him since.

At a young age, big brother Christian learned how to antagonize their father, a conservative Chicago judge, so that dad's attention would be deflected, causing him to beat up Christian instead of their mother. By time Christian left home, he had suffered a series of broken fingers, concussions, and even had some skin grafted on his arm where their dad had held it to an electric burner. On a regular basis, their father diffused any potential suspicion by moving the family to a different Chicago neighborhood.

After Christian left, Jace had taken over that role of trying to protect their mom from the beatings. But now that Jace has finally broken, he hasn't snuck away like Christian. He's finally swung first before getting himself beaten to a pulp and literally thrown out of the house. Now that she has no protectors left, Jace is determined to somehow get their mom to follow him to Albuquerque before their dad kills her.

Jace arrives at his big brother's house with little more than the envelope with Christian's address that Mom snuck him on his way out.

But that is all what was.

SPLIT is the story of the aftermath -- what will be -- the lasting impact upon these two brothers with rather different temperaments of growing up in that household. It is the tale of how Christian has in so many ways been avoiding his past and how -- five years later -- Jace's unexpected arrival at his doorstep threatens to unravel the new identity Christian has painstakingly built for himself.

How does a guy have a "normal" relationship after growing up watching his mother regularly being kicked, punched, and worse? Christian is in a long-term relationship with a woman who is completely different than their mother, but he has set it up so that he and Mirriam -- who is unaware of his past -- have rented adjoining apartments rather than sharing one.

And now, as Jace attempts to create his own new identity -- high school, bookstore job, soccer team, girls --and leave his nightmarish upbringing behind, no one in Albuquerque including his brother Christian is aware of the dark secret that Jace is harboring.

"Now in Christian's apartment, I close my eyes and try to stop the memory, as if I could stop the blister in my brain from bursting, now that I have pricked it."

SPLIT, by first-time author Swati Avasthi, is an exceptionally smart and incredibly intense read. It is one of those real must-have stories for high school kids about what it is to grow up to be a man.

I absolutely could not put this book down. I laughed. I cried. I hoped. I despaired. I hated it had to end.

This author has extraordinary talent.

SPLIT is a quick read. A light read. I'd like to say it was "fun read" but that seems somehow inappropriate given the book's central theme of domestic abuse.

The story is about a family where the father domineers by virtue of his fists and anger. The elder son escapes, only to find his estranged younger brother at his door, some five years later. What follows is the story of how this abuse effects their lives and their ability to move on. Along with a profound look at the nature of family, what we can do for each other, and what we can't.

TALKING POINTS:::
I must say that SPLIT is not the sort of book I usually pick up. I don't generally pick up books set in the present, and I'm not especially 'into' books that deal with the serious problems of teens in the present -- and yet, I could not put this book down. Or rather I did put it down multiple times -- I do have two children, a husband and a demanding cat -- but I quickly picked it up again... every chance I had, so that I finished it in less than 24 hours.

It's this inability to put the book down, even at the disturbing moments, which leads me to conclude that Swati Avasthi's writing is addictive. And which leads me to recommend this book to most people.

Interesting, and this is something of a side note, I didn't particularly care for the central character of Jace and Christian, his older brother. I did though find myself glued to the secondary characters of girlfriends. It was interesting to me to see how they reacted to the brothers, how their own reactions brought depths to the story.

A good read.

For Young Adults: SPLIT has violence and my not be for sensitive readers.

Pam T~
booksforkids-reviews

In "Split," Swati Avasthi takes up an ugly subject, domestic abuse. She renders it realistically, but at the same time she illuminates it with hope and compassion.

Thrown out of home by his own father, 16-year-old Jace Witherspoon has nowhere else to go but to New Mexico, to his older brother, Christian, whom Jace has not seen since Christian himself fled from their father's violence about 10 years ago.

"Split" is the story of these two brothers who are also strangers to each other. To Christian, Jace is a reminder of the painful past he had escaped and would rather not think about. To Jace, Christian is both the older brother he adored but the one who abandoned him. Author Avasthi builds up a satisfying and rich novel with the ambivalent feelings both young men have toward each other, with their differences as well as their similarities, with their shared past experiences and the challenge to overcome as well as to come to terms with the legacy domestic violence have left in them.

Avasthi does not shy away from bringing to the page the harrowing details of domestic abuse. She also shows that domestic violence is not just a problem of the uneducated and the poor. It is not an adult problem either. In "Split," Avasthi gets into the mind of Jace, whose anger sometimes turns him into a ticking bomb. Young people, teenagers like the protagonist of "Split," are at risk of becoming abusers too. The victim's side is also well handled by the author. Just as in real life, outsiders are confounded by the victims' willingness to stay with their abuser, so are Christian and Jace when it comes to their mother. Through the character of the mother, Avasthi can only present insights on why a woman would choose to stay in an abusive relationship. Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut answers.

"Split" keeps the readers' attention riveted to Jace's experiences. Will he be able to convince his mother to escape? Will he lose it and hit? Will he end up like his Dad? In spite of all the disturbing details, " Split" ends on a positive note: the abusive pattern can indeed be broken. This is a book to read and talk about with the teenagers in your life. Awareness is one step toward stopping domestic abuse.

"Sometimes I wonder why words can't actually make us bleed."

Those (few) of you who regularly read my reviews and generally put up with me on a daily basis already know I'm kind of a logic and control freak. I'm not of the tear-shedding, heart-warming or hair-pulling kind.
However, occasionally, I do find books that really touch me on a deeper level, that really make me feel inside the story and the characters' heads, up until the point when it really becomes empathy.
I ascribe this empathy completely to the writer's writing skills, to his or her capacity to capture the essence of, say, frustration, or happiness, or grief and translate it so well into words and situations and stories that I get "contaminated" by them. If that happens, the communicative purpose is accomplished.

Split is one of those books. It got to a point, about 60% in, that I decided to go to bed, but then turned and tossed and turned and tossed until I had to get up and go finish the bloody book. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The story is fairly simple: Jace has an abusive father. After the umpteenth beating he takes to protect his mother, he gets kicked out of the house, for good. He goes looking for his older brother, Christian, who vanished from their lives five years earlier to escape the same beatings, hoping to get their mother out of that same situation and to build a new life for himself.

Jace's voice is one of the most vibrant I have ever encountered in YA literature. He's one of those characters I seem to love so much, the ones I recognize as grey. He's not a bad guy, but he's certainly not a good guy either. In his words, he pledges to be " a bastard-no-longer". Somehow, this kind of character is the one that I find most believable and interesting, because it's a little more complex than most.

Jace has come to a very important point in his life, a crossroad which will determine his future and the person he'll be as an adult. It's up to him to decide whether he'll be like his father or if he'll become his own person and this internal struggle not to let the violence that he's witnessed all his life define him is the focal point around which the whole story revolves. In describing this, Swati Avasthi really excels, in my opinion: his ambivalence, his being split is so well portrayed, I felt it so much, that I couldn't help but feel ambivalent and split too toward a situation I would otherwise have condemned right from the beginning. She really puts you in a place where it's difficult to judge, to make a clear cut division between bad and good, because the line gets blurry in the middle.
This kind of blurriness seems to extend to all other characters too. From the selfish, loving though broken brother who might or not help Jace out, to the prying but caring girlfriend, to the helpless mother who's digging her own grave, every character lets us see different facets of the truth and lets us decide whether their choices are all condemnable or not.

I don't think that with these few, disconnected sentences I have even barely managed to do justice to such an intense and poignant story but I hope your interest will be piqued at least enough to make you want to pick it up and see for yourself. Maybe it will not touch you in the same way that it touched me, but I am fairly sure indifference will not be one the feelings you'll be left with.
A really great start to my new reading year, I will read anything this author publishes.

Split is an extremely important YA novel about child abuse and spousal abuse told from the point-of-view of the MC Jace. There is no doubt that Swati's has been placed in the elite category of brilliant authors such as Laurie Halse Anderson, Cheryl Rainfield, and Jay Asher. It is more than well-deserved and so are the awards Split received. Jace is one of the most unforgettable male YA characters I have ever read. The story he narrates is raw, honest, heartbreaking, revealing. I will be haunted by his experiences.
****spoiler*****
One of the most troubling scenes was a flashback of Jace beating his girlfriend, but the way he recognizes his mistake and takes responsibility shows tremendous growth and insight. The hardest part for me was lumping Jace in the "category" of abuser when he had been victimized, but Swati does a phenomenal job of showing the reader how easy that line can be crossed.
*****end of spoiler*****
Ultimately, this is a novel about hope. One of breaking free - making the split - from the past and moving on to building a future. The title reveals many "key" moments, plot points in the the book that readers should ponder the meaning of the word and the different scenes that it represents.
Split is a do-not-miss-YA novel! I will be recommending it over and over and over again.

A dark, harsh, raw and powerful story of abuse told from a impeccably-done male pov. I barely have words for how much I loved this book. Because it's disturbing and vivid, and almost palpable. Every scene had so much more involved, so much emotion, so many back-conflicts. It's a story about what happens when you survive an abusive home. Very few books deal with the after. After the problem. After it all fell apart. After you got out. It was so hard to read while consciously trying NOT to put myself in Jace's shoes. (Yes, I had an abusive father.) It was very hard to see things through his perspective. Because you can perfectly understand everything that he does, even if you don't want to or don't agree with it.

I've always loved dark realistic fiction, and specially love blunt authors who don't sugarcoat hard issues. This is a dark learning experience that has the potential to stir up feelings you can't even place. The writing was absolutely wonderful and matched the depth and brilliance of the story and characters perfectly. Every single character felt unique and wonderfully multidimensional in an utterly realistic way.

Overall it's an outstanding piece of literature so graphic and well-done, so perfectly thought and developed, and with such a great story to tell that it needs to be widely read.

I went into Split expecting a thoughtful piece on an abuse victim. I did not expect it to tear my heart out and check it at the door. I did not expect it to keep me enthralled, to keep me up late at night, anxiously flipping pages top find out what would happen next. But it happened. Split is the poster child for what a beautifully-broken story should be like.


I can't tell you how much my heart was hurting for Jace. You are seeing a story from the aftermath of the abuse. But through Jace's memories we slowly see bit by bit just how terrible life has been for his family. To be honest, I usually get bored in long memory scenes. Not in Split. I was drawn into Jace's memories, both anxious and afraid to get another piece of the puzzle. Asvasthi did a remarkable job at showing all sides of an abuse case. She showed what abuse does to everyone involved.


The characters were all fleshed out wonderfully detailed. Jace is interesting, sad, unique, funny, messed up, sweet, talented and so many other things. It was bitter-sweet learning his story. Bitter, for how he was raised and what he has been through, and sweet, for getting to know the person he is. Jace's brother, Christian, was also a wonderful character. He was so woven into Jace's memories and thoughts that it was impossible not to care for him as well. But besides Jace, Merriam was my favorite character. At first I thought she'd just be Christian's bitchy girlfriend. But she turned out to be a remarkable character. Some of my favorite scenes were the conversations between her and Jace.


The ending was perfect. It didn't tie everything up in a big, yellow bow. It answered enough questions to satisfy the reader, yet some remained open with the promise of hope. This unbelievably, yet realistic tale is one no one should miss. This one is going to help many teens to come, I just know it.