This is the most “celebrity book club” book I’ve ever read, and I mean that in an absolutely derogatory way.
Broken Country starts with a minor domestic tragedy on a farm owned by Frank and Beth, our narrator. As Frank and his brother Jimmy are dealing with their sheep, a neighbor’s dog runs into their enclosure and starts wildly attacking the lambs. Jimmy shoots the dog in order to save the flock, just as the neighbor and his young son catch up to their animal. The boy’s father turns out to be Gabriel, Beth’s first boyfriend, whom she hasn’t seen in years.
The novel than flashes forward a few years and we’re in a courtroom where Beth sits in the audience watching a man on trial for killing another man. This, for what it’s worth, is where the book started to lose me. The asinine “bit” of withholding the identities of the defendant and the victim just to bait the reader was so phony, especially once she had attorneys and witnesses refraining from mentioning names in their dialogue.
There are further chapters where we flash back to the relationship between Beth and Gabriel, whose rich family looks down on Beth and her schoolteacher parents. As Beth and Gabriel’s first relationship falls apart, we see them reconnect in parallel, despite Beth’s supposedly happy marriage to Frank. Beth and Frank’s tragic loss of their only child has an unexpected bearing on Beth’s relationship to Gabriel’s son, Leo, in ways that make Frank extremely wary.
As the details of the crime come into focus, the soap opera plotting gives way to a central mystery that is ultimately straightforward and distinctly unsatisfying. Some additional last-minute revelations do little to stir up the reader’s passions. The biggest problem is our protagonist, Beth, whose behavior reads as far more abhorrent and selfish than author Clare Leslie Hall’s treatment of it. There’s a dissonance caused by the difference between the audience’s perception of Beth and how it seems the author intends us to feel about her.
Broken Country is an extremely quick read, but all it has to offer is a boilerplate, bog-standard contemporary lit plot. There’s nothing distinguishing or accomplished about it.
