Norrisville Book Discussion Group June - Half Broken Things

HALF BROKEN THINGS By Joss Morag

Norrisville’s Book Discussion Group agreed that Scottish author Morag has crafted a fascinating book. This Silver Dagger Award winner is inhabited by three fascinating, flawed, damaged human beings who somehow manage to find each other and create a gruesome caricature of a close-knit family. Jean is a sixty-something-year-old house sitter. She has no friends, no family, nothing to anchor her—and now her agency has written her a letter informing her that her services are no longer needed after she completes her current nine-month assignment taking care of an elaborate mansion in a small rural town. Given the circumstances, she finds it impossible to resist taking on the persona of lady of the manor. Yet she still dreams of a non-existent family, centering around an imaginary long-lost son who will come and save here from her bleak future. Amazingly, the “son” shows up, another loser barely surviving on the meager spoils of various robberies and looking for a safe haven. With him is a young pregnant woman, another lost soul whom life has treated poorly. They immediately take to each other out of common yearning, and go farther and farther out on the limb of fantasy to keep their tiny bubble of safety intact.

According to the group, Morag’s real triumph involves seducing the reader into feeling sympathy for these lost souls, only to pull back in revulsion at their delusional amorality. Are these characters to be pitied or abandoned by the reader? Do they deserve a measure of happiness, or are they too warped to deserve anything other than jail time or worse?

For the most part, Morag makes clever use of the various characters points of view. However, her switching from third to first person in following Jean had most of the group confused at the beginning and almost despairing of catching onto the story. Fortunately, the group hung in there, and Morag’s slow but steady building of the story ultimately caught the group in her storytelling web.
Half Broken Things does not have a happy ending. Yet its characters and plot are so interesting that it’s worth reading anyway.

Submitted by Alan Zuckerman, the Norrisville group discussion moderator. Please call 410-692-7850 for information about future group meetings.