The Broken

by Tamar Cohen

[Leah]

As soon as I spotted Tamar Cohen’s new book on Netgalley, I knew I wanted to read it! Tamar is a very popular author, who writes Chick Lit Noir (I think that’s what they’re calling it these days), but her books could also probably land in the psychological thriller category (I think!). I haven’t read any of her books – though I have her first two novels on my shelf if I ever get the time to go back and read them (hopefully so) and I decided that starting with her newest novel The Broken. The synopsis offers what sounds like a fascinating, tricksy read, so I couldn’t wait to dive in. Coming off the back of reading Cally Taylor’s new novel The Accident, I was perhaps expecting a bit too much for this novel, and I felt very let down.

I was really looking forward to reading The Broken. So much. It hooked me quite well from the beginning, with with the exception of a strange entry from a girl named Lucie, a young girl, which (I have to be honest) made absolutely ZERO sense to the novel, until the very end and every time we were interrupted by an entry from Lucie, it just sort of felt off-kilter because it didn’t make sense. If you’re going to include stuff like that it needs to make sense as to why it’s there, and it was explained way too late (but more on that later). Dan announces to his friend Josh that he’s leaving his wife Sasha. All normal stuff, stuff that happens in life… But Josh and Hannah are best friends with Dan and Sasha, and so the break-up makes their life way more awkward than they would like – they’ve got Dan kipping on their couch, and Sasha popping round constantly and neither wants to give the other an inch, and neither Hannah nor Josh want to pick sides, but soon the fight turns nasty, and Hannah and Josh may be forced to choose sides, if only for their own sanity.

While the initial premise for The Broken is interesting, I just didn’t think it worked because what’s the one thing people tell you when a couple break-up: Whether you like it or not, you will have to choose sides and Josh and Hannah made the fatal (FATAL) mistake of trying to stay friends with both Sasha and Dan. And so the entire novel is like one big game of Dan and Sasha trying to get their friends to choose sides – Dan’s constantly whinging, and moaning, and crying, even though it’s all his fault it all happened; and Sasha is having one big meltdown, swinging from happy to sad in the blink of an eye like a Jekyll and Hyde character. The negativity in the novel is immense, and makes the novel so difficult to read, when on every page there’s Dan or Sasha whinging about the other person, effing and blinding, and making accusations left, right and centre, and Hannah and Josh are fighting because Hannah’s sticking up for Sasha, and Josh is sticking up for Dan and it was just so messy. As the reader, I felt like I was being screamed at from all corners and I didn’t like it. I wish they had just picked bloody sides. I felt on edge whenever I was reading, because I didn’t know what spitefulness I was going to have to hear next. It was way too much, too much hate, too much vitriol. And I just simply didn’t like it. I wanted to block my ears, and sing “La la la” at the top of my voice until it was all over.

The Broken just muddled along the entire novel, with things becoming more increasingly erratic, as Sasha just unravelled. But do you know what annoyed me most of all? The very last chapter. The last chapter was immense, the best chapter I read in the entire book, and it turned the entire novel in its head. So my question is: Why the heck did it take until the final chapter for that truth to come out? It was completely out of left-field. It was clever, don’t get me wrong, but I was just sat there saying, “What?” because it just didn’t ring true for the rest of the novel. It felt like a sad excuse to try and confuse the reader (which it did). If Tamar Cohen had managed to intigrate that into the novel more, it would have been so much better, instead we had to listen to four grown adults argue like children during every single page of the novel and it was physically exhausting. I wanted to love the book, but it rather took after it’s title and it just felt broken. It was a good tale of what NOT to do during a break-up, sure, but it was tiring to read. I am super disappointed, but this novel just didn’t work for me on any level, except for that very last chapter, and that just gave the novel an entirely different spin.