Although I loved Jenny Valentine's Me, the Missing, and the Dead, I've never gotten around to reading any of her other books until now. But Broken Soup was mentioned a couple of times in Trinkets—one of the girls steals a copy of it, and by the end all three of them have read it, which is fitting because it deals with grief and all three of them have also dealt with different forms of grief and COULD THIS BE A LONGER ASIDE?—so I did what I've been doing WAY TOO MUCH LATELY and ordered it.
And now I'm wondering why the heck it's taken me so long to reconnect with Jenny Valentine, because she does write a good book.
It's been two years since 15-year-old Rowan Clark's older brother Jack died and her family fell apart. Her father walked out and is completely oblivious to the fact that her mother now spends most of her time in a depressed, drugged stupor. For two years, Rowan's been the only one even trying to keep the pieces together, and for all intents and purposes, she's been the only parent in the household: cooking, cleaning, paying the bills, making sure that her younger sister is healthy, clean, safe, and as happy as possible.
One day, she's in line at the grocery store when a boy taps her on the shoulder and hands her a photo negative. When she tells him it isn't hers, he insists that he saw her drop it, so rather than make a scene, she takes it. Some time later, she and her new friend Bee develop the photo, and Rowan is completely shocked to discover that it's a picture of her brother, Jack.
So, in a way, the negative really did belong to her, even if she'd never seen it before.
Broken Soup is about grief and about healing, about hopelessness and about survival, about how you can love and hate the same person at exactly the same time, about family and friendship and love and responsibility, about keeping control and letting go. Like Me, the Missing, and the Dead, it explores the differences between the reality of our loved ones and about the way we remember them when they're gone:
When I think of people like Kurt Cobain or River Phoenix or Marilyn Monroe, it seems the most famous thing they ever did was die young. They stopped being real people who took drugs or told lies or went to the bathroom or whatever. The became saints and geniuses overnight. They became whoever anyone wanted them to be.
It was the same with Jack. He was a saint. We were just the living.
It's a sad book, but not necessarily a crying one. Yes, Rowan and Stroma are living in a situation that is brutally heartbreaking on a daily basis:
But after Jack died, they protected themselves by refusing to love us, the kids who had dying still to do. And it fell to us to keep ourselves alive until somebody remembered we were there.
But, it's also a story about new beginnings. Rowan's new friendship with Harper, the American boy who hands her the negative, prompts an exploration of and new appreciation for London, a city that she's lived in her whole life but never really paid much attention to, and through her new friendship with Bee—and Bee's family—she begins to build a new circle of trust, support, and love.
In Broken Soup, Jenny Valentine never dismisses grief, but she does show how tragedy can be a catalyst for change: after her brother's death, Rowan steps up, grows up, and ultimately, blooms.
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Book source: Bought.
I didn't love Me, the Missing, and the Dead, but oh, Broken Soup was so good. Absolutely loved it and wish more people knew about it.
And now I must read Trinkets.
Posted by: Trisha | 09 July 2013 at 02:53 PM