Broken Sleep

by Kaimana Wolff

Can you escape a past you never knew?

Four hardworking professionals live the good life–until one falls into a hole in a Vancouver street. As the world’s colors change, each man grapples with shadows of war as Jane tumbles into the abyss of the Disappeared.

Paul and Zack, thrown together by what may be Jane’s last testament, are hardly excited about cooperating with each other on any issue, least of all on the disappearance, weeks ago, of their mutual friend and her little daughter.

What did Jane expect of them–if anything? What does her story mean–if anything? And what, if anything, should they do about Matt, Jane’s beloved husband, the man each of them suspects?

Caught in an ancient web of caring and enduring, action and restraint, law and healing, Zack and Paul enact the next steps–in Jane’s existence as well as their own.

Genres: Canadian Literature

485 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 2005

About the author

Kaimana Wolff, novelist, poet and playwright, survives in a small community on the coast of British Columbia with her friend, a beautiful soul housed in a wolfish body. Often Lord Tyee and Wolff can be heard devising new howls, songs and dances on the lawns, in the parks, and in glens of the great forests still permitted to stand.

Reviews

[Katje van Loon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A harrowing exposé of abuse...hard to read, as someone who's lived through it. But a necessary book -- if you've ever wondered why a victim of abuse stays with their abuser, this book might shed some light on that for you.

What I liked most about this book is the abandonment of an obsession with perfectly likeable characters. Each character has their flaws, their personality points that made me recoil, but it did not stop me from rooting for them. It did not stop me from caring about them.

This is so important, especially in a world that demands female characters be perfect to receive our love. Jane is not 100% likeable, nor perfect -- she is a flawed woman -- but that does not diminish one's feelings of empathy for her, for her situation; it does not diminish one's hope that she get out of the situation in which she finds herself.

A line that hit me in the heart:

"I can’t admit to having loved a monster for thirteen years. It wasn’t always like this.
Or was it?”

That slow, dawning realization that you are trapped with someone who has no regard for your wellbeing, your personhood, is one that many survivors of abuse know all too well.

The book is not your standard novel -- the format is odd, perhaps offputting, but I found that soon I was drawn in. I could not stop reading. I stayed up all night to finish it, and when I was away from it I wondered what would happen next. Cerebral, yes; character-driven, yes. Boring? Not on your life.

Both a good first book in a series and an impressive standalone. (As I've read La Chiripa, the second book in the series, first, I feel I should note: you can read these out of order. Each book works as a standalone as well as it works as part of a series.)

Disclaimer: I've received an early, earlier-than-ARC look at this book because of my special relationship with the author. Broken Sleep is due to be released in June in paperback and ebook.

[Eva van Loon]

This book was published in 2014, not 2005. It is the first book, set in 1995, in *The Widening Gyre Trilogy*. The second book in the trilogy is *La Chiripa*, set in 2000. Yet to come is *Pale Criminal*. A slim companion volume, *White Birds: dreams for dancers*, presents five dreams, each with an accompanying poem, which together illustrate a woman's progress with dealing with abusive, even psychopathic behavior, from victim to warrior.

That's one of the major themes of the trilogy (so far), although the story, which follows a mother, child and father on a kind of pilgrimage from domestic violence in the first book, through international skulduggery in the second book, to global psychopathy in the third book, is at heart an examination of what's gone wrong with so called western civilization.

In *Broken Sleep*, for example, the four main characters are re-enacting roles played during WW II by their parents, in their own generation's Boomer lives. Compassionate Zack and heroic Paul put their courage to the sticking point to rescue their friend Jane, the desperate mother terrorized by despotic Matt. One of the themes of the trilogy is "the disappeared" and *Broken Sleep* suggests that being disappeared can happen to anyone, not just the powerless and downtrodden. Faced with Matt's psychopathic behavior, Jane finds she is losing her power and her place in her lawyerly world and she has no idea how far those losses will go: will she be killed? Will she kill herself? Can she escape? As the tensions rise, she thinks of a way of leaving behind a vital message.

Readers who appreciate structure will enjoy the pic-in-pic arrangement of story elements that Wolff uses to blur the line between reality and memory. Jane's story is nested inside the story of Paul and Zack do about Jane's story; in turn, a parallel story nested in the epilogue puts a twist on the reader's sense of whether Jane's terror is warranted or is the product of a hysterical imagination. The prologue and epilogue, "Evening" and "Morning", here are essential plot elements and give the reader the satisfying sense of the 24-hour unity.

[Carroll Straus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know Eva so I learned a LOT--I learned that many of us who were abused yet cannot return it--or turn our rage on anyone else, because we genuinely cannot bear to hurt others, end up having it returned to us by those we love.

And it's also a good book!!!