Broken

I went to book club last night. I've been in my book club for about ten years, more or less. The book we read last month was Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos.

I liked this book a lot. A debut novel, there were places where it was difficult to keep my suspension of disbelief. Sometimes things tied up too conveniently. There were required stretches. However, despite this, it was a book that grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and had my full attention.

I liked the old lady who recognized the life in the objects of her home.

I loved the parts that dealt with the zen moment when creation takes over and the mind's chatter surceases.

But I mostly related to the theme of picking up the pieces of broken lives; of putting them back together in ways that would hardly have been imagined before the rents and tears and smashing of all that was.

It reminded me of one of my favorite posts of all time.

Here are a few excerpts from the book...

The more she worked, the more she became familiar with a kind of magic which only happened when she let go. For years her mind had looked like a legal pad, lined and occupied carefully with written numbers, to do lists.....this was the kind of inner noise she struggled to eliminate...only when she was quiet inside, when her mind was a large empty room instead of many cluttered ones, only then did the magic happen.

The broken are not always gathered together of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of senseless tragedies, but really: is there really any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Children are killed. Madmen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep and endlessly mourned. Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view.

Look now. Look at what you value, what you hold dear....Look then at the faces and bodies of the people you love. The explicit beauty that comes not from smoothness of skin or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience that has left its mark...You need not be told that these records are what render your beloved beautiful. If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces; rough, and random and no two alike.