Review: First off, I have to fall all over myself to make a disclaimer. Books that I work on via my Mia Darien Author Services, I have made a point of not doing reviews of. I don’t want any appearance of impropriety that I’m being “paid” for my reviews, since I never am except in free books, but Broken by Angela Chrysler is too powerful to not want to spread the word about.

So in being entirely up front, I worked on this book both in editing and formatting. None of this was for reviewing. In fact, she doesn’t even know I’m doing this… (Hi, Angela.) I did give her a quote for her website, but have decided it wasn’t enough.

All that being said…

It cannot be stressed enough that this book is not for everyone. It was incredibly hard to read. As she tells you over and over in her description and author’s notes, it features a lot of topics that will make people very uncomfortable and could even be dangerous for some readers as “trigger” topics for victims of trauma.

If you can read it, however, it’s hypnotic in her storytelling. It reads with the ease of literature but with the organic flow of a person’s recollections. It’s raw.

When I was younger, my mother told me about what it was like to see Judy Garland sing live; that she was like an exposed nerve on stage. She couldn’t put herself out there without just putting all of herself out there, which had to be the source of her greatest gifts and greatest flaws. Reading Broken was, for me, what I imagined seeing Garland sing was like.

It was like opening up pages to a person holding their heart and soul in their hands, bleeding in front of you, and screaming, listen to me and how can you not listen? When someone stands before you like that, it is almost impossible to truly ignore what is right before your eyes. I could barely tear my own away, even through the darkest scenes and the spirit-grinding moments that are described, both with chilling rationality and bleeding passion. Like you put down the book and are almost surprised that your hands are clean.

If you can read this book, I don’t think you’ll come out the other side precisely as you were. And it is with great courage that Ms. Chrysler has come to share it. It deserves no less than my best rating. Even though the events and history in the story are not to be celebrated, the author is. 5 Fireballs. See the original review here.

 

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