The Break: British Book Awards Author of the Year 2022

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I actually picked this book up ages ago after Margaret Atwood recommend it on Reco, and I am so glad I finally got around to reading it. From her exquisitely rendered characters to her fully realized world and the ratcheting tension, I couldn’t put it down.

She and her friend have a chapter now and again but I found them somewhat simplistic compared to the others. Gerade letzteres macht auch auf die verschwundenen indigenen Frauen Kanadas aufmerksam und ist gerade mit diesem Hintergrund besonders erschütternd.The author presents three generations of women in the family; their hard lives, how they struggle with their families, the men in their lives, and the perceptions of their neighbours and the police. In the end, the perpetrator is apprehended (the identity of the one who committed the crime is never in doubt for the reader), but Vermette seems to indicate, it is not the serving of justice but traditional aboriginal beliefs and rituals that will bring whatever healing is to be found.

Generational Rape is the villain, for the perpetrators are faceless and nameless, and usually men, until in the predictable denouement, we see this villain cross genders. We get detailed accounts of domestic activities: feeding and caring for children, caring for the sick and the elderly, visits between the sisters to each others’ homes.The Break begins when a young mother witnesses an assault being committed outside of her house on a snowy, isolated strip of land in Winnipeg’s North End. The Break begins with Stella, a woman who witnesses a violent crime from her kitchen window late at night. I would have much preferred if the narrative hadn’t included his perspective and had focused on the women making up the girl’s family. The result is a new and complete look from which to rediscover a very commercial product with a long shelf life. The boy in The Round House has that, too, but the reader feels his mother’s isolation so keenly that it changes the overall experience to my mind.