Title: Broken Girl
Author: Caroline Laner Breure and Bradley Trevor Greive
Publisher: Hachette Publishing
Pages: 346
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
This is a very touching book co-written by Caroline Laner Breure and Bradley Trevor Greive, based on Caroline’s own tragic yet ultimately uplifting story. Caroline woke up from a coma induced by Traumatic Brain Injury, with large parts of her memory missing. Broken Girl is the story of her joyful life before her tragic accident, how it seemed to unravel in the aftermath, and how she got back her memories and put her broken life together after betrayal and grave illness.
Born in Campo Grande, in Brazil, Caroline moved to Porto Alegre for her higher education. A graduate of civil engineering and business management, she moved to Sydney in Australia, in the hope of a better life. Along the way, she started her own business, making and selling cruelty-free shoes—Brand No Saints.
In Sydney, she met Byron, an immigrant to Australia from South Africa. A romance blossomed between the two, with Caroline eventually moving in with Byron. Her new life with Byron was a heady one, with Caroline not only being befriended by Byron’s friends, but also getting swept along on a new lifestyle, travelling to foreign countries, and holidaying abroad.
On one such trip to Portugal and Span, Byron and Caroline met her mother Jucelia and stepfather Qelbes in Lisbon, where Byron admitted to wanting to marry her and start a family together. But then in Spain, tragedy struck. Caroline was hit by a police car driving at top speed, and suffered traumatic brain injury, lapsing into a coma.
Through the painful hospital stay and the process of rehabilitation, with the added challenge of being stuck in a foreign country with minimal support from the authorities, the challenges imposed by Covid, and betrayal by the man she loved the most, Caroline’s mother stands by her side.
As readers, we are swept along on the budding romance. The first hint of trouble comes at the 18 percent mark when we have brought into the young love story.
The writing is mostly accessible and easy, but also scintillating at places.
Here’s the authors’ description of coma:
A coma has two rooms.
The first is a padded cell in the belly of oblivion.
A dungeon of eternal night for the mind’s eye…
The second room is far stranger.
A place of hunger and shadows.
The walls are porous, and every perforation is a tiny mouth, feeding on fragments of light and noise, sensitive to scent and touch.
Your ancient animal self is chained here, snarling, weeping, vomiting incoherent commands to your body.
Shrieking with pain.
I also enjoyed the observations about cities, people and feelings:
Porto Alegre: home to epic book fairs, rebellions and ghost stories
Sydney is a city of white teeth and suntanned legs.
Australian egalitarianism is found in a frosted glass.
Caroline herself as A ravenous young woman of the world ordering one of everything on the menu.
The holiday season in Australia is A little like Carnaval in Brazil but slightly less public nudity, and almost no one has rhythm.
The cover, depicting a woman’s profile displayed in multiple shards of broken glass, gives us a hint of a life shattered, but also a life painstakingly being put together again.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
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