Beautiful Broken Things, Sara Bernard
Genres: Young Adult Contemporary, Teen Fiction, Mental Health YA
Themes: Abuse, Mental Health, Injury, friendship
★★★★
I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story
Sara Bernard, Beautiful Broken Things
Beautiful Broken Things is a YA contemporary centred around the beautiful intensity, hardships and jealously of teenage friendships. Friendship is at the very core of this very real story and I want to emphasise that if you aren’t someone who can handle books about extremely real flawed characters, I’d stay away from this.
Caddy and Rosie have an inseparable bond and have been best friends for a lifetime, but when the new girl Suzanne moves to Brighton and develops a friendship with Rosie, Caddy becomes extremely jealous and believes that Suzanne is threatening their lifelong friendship. Suzanne has a dark past and mysterious secrets that Caddy is determined to uncover, what happens when the seemingly worst thing that happens to you turns out to be the thing you needed all along?
I want to begin by talking about our insufferable protagonist, Caddy Oliver, the noticeably flawed private school girl with a plan to experience something significant to override her self acclaimed uninteresting self. Caddy has the destructive ideology that significant life events – more specifically tragedies, are at the core of being an interesting individual, and if we’re being honest with ourselves that is an ancestral wound passed down through lifetimes and I am certain many people have felt this way before. People wear their trauma as a badge of honour, as though the life events that affected them most give them some kind of credibility and opening to defend themselves. Whilst this makes Caddy unlikable, I love how Sara chose to use this with the aim of showing how flawed the teenage brain can be.
The companion novel, Fierce Fragile Hearts further emphasises my theory that Suzanne was always supposed to be at the heart centre of this story. The first book shows us Suzanne from the very flawed perspective of Caddy who idolises her and takes on the role of caretaker, whilst in the second instalment, we are seeing Suzanne’s story through her own eyes. Whilst I can see the critiques and flaws other readers have about this book, I appreciate the reality it’s drawn from. I’m not a person who enjoys reading about unrealistically perfect characters. I much prefer a growth arc with flawed humans learning important life lessons. Although, I feel like this book fails to give Caddy that much needed growth.
Suzanne is so beautifully flawed and she carries her trauma with her. She is someone who needs another person to take care of her and validate her. I saw my teenage self in Suzanne. Caddy needs to be needed because she sees herself to be extremely uninteresting with no significance in herself or her life events. You’ll find yourself hoping that these two break through the barriers of their self depreciation. Once you get past irritation that is Caddy, you’ll see that this is a beautiful story about friendship and mental health and how destructive that can be.
What did you think about Beautiful Broken Things?
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