Review: Like Broken China

'' It often felt as though I was holding together a broken teacup with my bare hands. An unsteady piece of china riddled with cracks that no glue in the world could repair. When a chip fell I would lunge to retrieve it, doing my best not to get cut in the process. ''

★★★☆☆

From Goodreads:

Is love enough to repair the pieces of a shattered life?

This is the question plaguing Courtney Cook’s mind as she packs what feels like her whole existence into a 20ft moving van. When she encountered Matt for the first time in a coffee shop ten years prior, she was immediately transfixed. Dark, adventurous and wildly untamed, Matt was everything Courtney didn’t know she wanted. One night of uninhibited abandon is all it took for her to be completely enthralled by the boy without limits. Now with two children, a sky-high mortgage and a marriage crippled by addiction, Courtney finds her world is riddled with cracks that no amount of love can repair.

Powerful and provoking with humor woven throughout the raw sting of heartbreak, Like Broken China offers an honest take on the decisions two people make and the aftermath that can destroy an entire decade because of them.

 What do you do when the reality you kept on wanting to believe finally comes crashing down? And there's nothing you can't do to save it.

At first, I thought this was based on a real-life story, this could have. The story felt quite relatable, no plot twist was over the top or anything. Courtney's character is what I would imagine a suppressed women to be in her situation. She lets herself be pushed to the ground, caring about other people and their opinions. There is no 'Courtney wants or needs', just 'what other people want and need'.

The book deals with a plethora of hard topics, most of them being those that are not discussed, more deemed as taboos in society. Taboos are not discussed openly, if at all, and so it has been presented in the book. As a secret one woman bears in order to keep their picture-perfect illusion of a family from shattering to pieces.

The story is told in the present day, where Courtney sorts through her mess-of-a-life. She tries grasping the falling pieces, her children, economical situation, relationships, but can't seem to hold them together long enough to ensemble anything permanent. The other side of the story is told from the beginning, when she first met her, now ex, husband. How their relationship began and how it eventually ended up in the divorce which she is going through in the present day. I really liked that I got to see and read the explanations, the entire story of how it happened. It tells a lot about Courtney's character and how she developed from what she was int he beginning int the quiet woman she has repressed herself to be.

You can't expect most of the turns of the plot before they even start happening. There isn't much foreshadowing going on, but as the book's intention is to describe Courtney's journey from under her husband's influence to face the world, you can expect certain events to take place. The predictability doesn't make the book worse, it actually helps the reader to shift their focus to other things, like the character development.

Sometimes you just meet a book with a title that describes the book perfectly. With Like Broken China, I had a hunch in the beginning what it stood for but later in the book realised accurate it is. You can break a teacup and glue it back together, but will it hold the tea you pour into it? That is what this book is really about.