Best friends Caddy and Rosie are inseparable. Their differences have brought them closer, but as she turns sixteen Caddy begins to wish she could be a bit more like Rosie – confident, funny and interesting. Then Suzanne comes into their lives: beautiful, damaged, exciting and mysterious, and things get a whole lot more complicated. As Suzanne’s past is revealed and her present begins to unravel, Caddy begins to see how much fun a little trouble can be. But the course of both friendship and recovery is rougher than either girl realises, and Caddy is about to learn that downward spirals have a momentum of their own.
From the premise and the cover only, I wasn’t expecting to get into something this heavy. But as soon as I found out about Suzanne, I was like “ooohhh, it’s that sort of book.”
Beautiful, Broken Things follows Caddy, a relatively sheltered sixteen year old who longs for something to make her life “significant,” because nothing interesting has ever really happened to her. Not in the way her sister has bipolar disorder, or how her best friend Rosie lost a sister to crib death. Yeah, she’s that sort of girl.
After skimming a few Goodreads reviews, I get why some readers might find her insufferable. She does, technically, romanticise tragedy. However, when I was sixteen, a boy once told me he broke up with his girlfriend because “nothing had ever happened to her” and she wasn’t “depressed enough.” So, is Caddy unbearable? Maybe. But does she reflect the messy, misguided thought process of an actual sixteen year old? Most likely.
I was sixteen, and I honestly believed I was due a love story.
― Sara Barnard, Beautiful Broken Things
Anyway, her life shifts when Suzanne arrives and befriends Rosie. Suzanne is vibrant, magnetic, and carries a traumatic past. Wooh. At first I thought it would be about jealousy in girl friendships and yah, it did have that but that’s not where this story goes. As Suzanne folds herself into the dynamic between Caddy and Rosie, tensions rise and boundaries start to blur. Caddy’s need to feel needed and Suzanne’s need to be saved? (or understood? or something) spark a friendship that’s as intense as it is unsustainable.
The escalation of the events in this book are simultaneously dull but somehow really insane. It’s like things happen and you don’t really care but at the same time there is this hovering sense of dread, “like oh no please don’t do that, you ignorant child.”
I’m just saying that sadness isn’t beautiful. And if it looks that way, it’s a lie.
― Sara Barnard, Beautiful Broken Things
There’s no love quite like the one between teenage girls – and I mean this platonically even. There’s a raw, complicated bond that’s difficult to put into words, but this book captures it perfectly. Girl friendships are weird, especially at that age. But they are also mundane. And by God, are they also chaotic.
Reading this book made me realise my mom doesn’t thank me enough for not doing sixteen year old crap like sneaking out to parties and getting suspended for throwing a chair at obnoxious boys. Or worse yet, sneaking into an abandoned building and falling through a roof, goddamnit.
I tapped ‘trigger warning’ into the search and scrolled through the results, which only confused me more. The top entry was, bewilderingly, something to do with feminism.
― Sara Barnard, Beautiful Broken Things
Everyone and their literal mother sorta annoyed me in this book, but I think it was a realistic depiction regardless. The choices they made, from the kids to the adults, though interesting to say the least, felt kinda familiar.
From a lived and observed experience sort of view, I sorta like how every single relationship is portrayed. I might not encourage such friendships or dynamics in real life, but I’ve seen them in real life. Particularly, I think the story did a great job of showing the insidious but compounding effect of peer pressure. How some times it starts slow and harmless and then suddenly you are in over your head.
I’ll start having standards when I am lucky enough to have choices.
― Sara Barnard, Beautiful Broken Things
Despite everything I’ve said, I’m not sure I’d recommend this book because even as I type this I am sort of forgetting what really went on it. At the same time, I’m remembering just enough to make me want to pick up the rest of the books in this series – later. I don’t know what to tell you, except it’s an okay book, man. I think at one point it made me cry but I cry easily. I can’t even remember why it made me cry. It won’t stay with me but it was alright. 3/5 stars.
And no one can break your heart like a best friend.
― Sara Barnard, Beautiful Broken Things
