SURVIVORS SHAKEN BY MORE THAN EARTH
Debut novelist explores how much one person can bend before breaking
As The Broken Places opens, deft first-time novelist Frances Peck introduces a handful of anxious characters who've had better days. They're harried, bothered by scheduling minutia or gruelling work deadlines. They nurse grudges and resentments as they dredge up earlier scenes from home and office.
On this warm May, a “day like any other,” Peck's characters feel burdened or overwhelmed by the knotted complexities of the lives they've made; for them, the future looks like a long stretch of diminishing returns. Little do they know the Cascadia Subduction Zone has a wallop of a surprise for them: Just before noon the Great Vancouver Earthquake will shake the city to rubble.
Whether an overbearing “celebrity entrepreneur” or the unhappy daughter of one, Peck's survivors will be tested by unimaginable conditions. Peck conjures an enthralling lifeboat scenario that prompts at least one constant question: Who will survive and why? Heroic, cowardly, certain then conflicted, selfish and altruistic, Peck's interesting albeit tight-wound characters prove compelling on their own.
Once the quake hits and characters respond, Peck muses smartly on how much one can bend before breaking as well as how much mending is possible after rot has set in. While interview excerpts at chapter endings indicate at least one person survives, Peck excels at keeping readers taut with anticipation.
As stimulating as it is to consider a Vancouver shaken and splintered in 45 seconds or partake in the thought experiment of how you might react in a catastrophe, the novel's core is not what the disaster looks like — smoke, fires, thousands dead, an “orgy of annihilation.”
It's the human story.