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All the Broken Things

by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

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515499,832 (3.67)6
A novel of exceptional heart and imagination about the ties that bind us to each other, broken and whole, from one of the most exciting voices in Canadian fiction.      September, 1983. Fourteen-year-old Bo, a boat person from Vietnam, lives in a small house in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto with his mother, Thao, and his four-year-old sister, who was born severely disfigured from the effects of Agent Orange. Named Orange, she is the family secret; Thao keeps her hidden away, and when Bo's not at school or getting into fights on the street, he cares for her.      One day a carnival worker and bear trainer, Gerry, sees Bo in a streetfight, and recruits him for the bear wrestling circuit, eventually giving him his own cub to train. This opens up a new world for Bo--but then Gerry's boss, Max, begins pursuing Thao with an eye on Orange for his travelling freak show. When Bo wakes up one night to find the house empty, he knows he and his cub, Bear, are truly alone. Together they set off on an extraordinary journey through the streets of Toronto and High Park. Awake at night, boy and bear form a unique and powerful bond. When Bo emerges from the park to search for his sister, he discovers a new way of seeing Orange, himself and the world around them.    All the Broken Things is a spellbinding novel, at once melancholy and hopeful, about the peculiarities that divide us and bring us together, and the human capacity for love and acceptance.… (more)
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Showing 5 of 5
This book should be listed as a YA novel as the plot is pretty simple and very slow. The main character is a 14 year old Vietnamese boy who has a severely disabled younger sister. The right of the story borderline on distasteful events as he becomes involved in training bears for a carnival, which usually involves animal cruelty. Another carnival worker that runs tries to get the boy's younger sister in his freak show. At the point, the story gets too weird. ( )
  kerryp | Dec 7, 2020 |
All the Broken Things by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is a devastatingly marvellous book, a story that focuses on the unfortunate sufferings of its main character, 14-year-old Bo, a young refugee from Vietnam who lives with his highly pessimistic mother, Rose, and his violent four-year-old sister who is severely disfigured from the affects of Agent Orange.

While Bo is burdened with school and taking care of his disabled sister, the responsibilities deferred to him by his incompetent and devastated mother, he is also haunted by the defiant memory of the untimely death of his father, and what it means to be a cultural outsider.

Though he does have some people rooting for him, his happiness, and success, in the form of his teacher, Miss Lily, and mature classmate and friend, Emily, the only way he can cope with his turbulent anger and frustration is by fighting with a schoolyard bully named Ernie.

An outlet for his pent-up rage, he fights Ernie on a daily basis until he is discovered and recruited by a carnival worker and bear trainer, Gerry, who not only befriends him, but eventually gives him his own bear cub to raise, who he names, for lack of a better word, Bear.

While he must fend off the interest of carnival owner, Max, from discovering the uniqueness of his sister, Orange, and deter and manage the depression of his mother, Rose, who is unable to hold a job, or look at, or look after the daughter who incites in her the pain of guilt and memory, Bo, takes solace from secretly training and raising Bear in the confines of his small backyard until they both become nomads in the wilderness of High Park.

To read the rest of this review, you're more than welcome to visit my blog, The Bibliotaphe Closet: http://zaraalexis.wordpress.com

- Zara ( )
  ZaraD.Garcia-Alvarez | Jun 6, 2017 |
I was very much minded of Rohinton Mistry's novels when reading Kuitenbrower's All the Broken Things, albeit we've changed from writing about the tragedies of India's people to the tragedy of Canada's.

In this case Kuitenbrower tells a deftly-crafted tale of a Vietnamese mother, son and daughter who are refugees just after the infamous civil war that ravaged their country. Not only are they victims of the war, but of that deadly and devastating chemical known as Agent Orange, large quantities of which were produced in Grimsby, Ontario, by Uniroyal.

The story centres around the boy, Bo, who attempts to find the strength and compassion to not only deal with his mother who is rapidly sinking into depression, extreme poverty and the effects of Agent Orange, but his sister who was born grotesquely deformed because of the chemical.

It is also a story about freaks and misfits who find a home in the carnivals and sideshows that toured southern Ontario, and were featured at the Canadian National Exhibition.

So it is a story about broken people, broken in body and spirit. It is a story about broken morality. Broken promises. Broken trust.

And it is utterly, completely mesmerizing in the simplicity and beauty of Kuitenbrower's phrasing and story-telling ability.

Highly recommended. ( )
1 vote fiverivers | Feb 7, 2015 |
*This review originally appeared here, on Buried In Print.

If she were to tell the story again, it would be a little different.

You might wonder how, because Bo's story seems all-of-a-piece, powerful just as it is, at once archetypal and unique.

"No one knows. But one thing is true. Whenever someone retells a story, bits get added and bits get lost."

Does this mean the story is broken?

Is there some pure version back at the beginning?

And what of the hero's responsibility to the tale?
The hero in All the Broken Things is Bo.

Readers meet him on the novel's first page.
“'But, children, really, what makes a hero a hero?'

'He’s someone who loves so much, he does valiant deeds,'” says a schoolgirl in Bo's class.

Our boy-hero loves his sister, Orange, and his mother, Thao (Rose), and his bear, Bear. He loves so much.

And he performs valiant deeds.

But there is a question of how valiant those deeds are.

Sometimes the deeds appear valiant to an audience, but the performers are aware that they are not.

For instance, Bo wrestles bears on the carnival circuit; it is a charade - a choreographed and tightly controlled exercise - which entertains and awes those who believe it is wrestling.

Sometimes the deeds do not appear to be valiant, and there is no appreciative audience to suggest otherwise.

For instance, he dutifully and loyally cares for Orange - whose exposure to Agent Orange in utero has dramatically impacted her appearance and capacity - but only his mother is aware of this responsibility and she, too, simply accepts it as a necessary element of everyday life.

For readers, Bo is valiant from the beginning. The novel's opening scene is charming, simultaneously revealing both courage and innocence. Sensorily rich (particularly in touch and taste), the situation is simple and the language uncomplicated, and Bo takes shape as a hero.

But with and without an audience, Bo is an actor. Literally, in the school play - in which he is cast as the hero, Orfeo - and sometimes he acts like someone he is not in other ways (whether fighting a neighbourhood bully, or hiding his affection for a girl).

This is an important question: what is a performance, and what is real.

Even Bo isn't entirely sure what is real. Some of the horrifying events of his young life seem like a dream. Or maybe he just wants to think they were a dream.

"And now they’d lived here for years, and it was like a dream where some things were real but you were never sure."

To complicate the matter further, there is a distinction between what one chooses to see and what one pretends not to see.

Sometimes it is difficult to see anything at all.

"The ocean housed another world you couldn’t see unless it came to the surface, or where the water was very shallow."

Sometimes the trees get in the way. Just as Orfeo enters the underworld, Bo enters the undergrowth; he disappears into the forest for a time, when someone he loves is missing. (The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has many versions, but this seems to be consistent.) As in the mythic story, people Bo loves can vanish.
Sometimes it is difficult to understand, to articulate what might have happened, what might be real.

"Always between them there were questions, but never were these questions asked. For Bo it was as if the air thickened in the space between his thought and his voice."

There is a sense of Bo caught between two states, a sense of enchantment at work."There was a charmed waiting between them."

The hero, Orfeo, is known for charming people with his music. He is capable of greatness.

When Rose reads the story, she is puzzled: “It says: ‘I rode into a rock, and went three miles or more.’ How can this be? How can a person ride into a rock?”

In many ways, Rose, too, is pretending. She adopts another name. She is suffering in ways that she does not articulate to her son. She represents herself in a particular light to a man who offers the family a degree of security.

She looms large in Bo's world as his mother, but in the wider world she holds another shape. "She did not look small; she looked smaller than that. She looked like a drawing of a person."

Drawings and photographs, carnivals and plays, legends and histories, wooded pathways and midways, pools and caves: they all contain stories, hint at other versions.

How do we see the people in these stories, identify the heroes and the monsters?

"If a person thought that humans only came in one shape, then they were fascinated by these [Other] beings. It was as simple as that."

In some ways, All the Broken Things, could be seen as exploring the idea of difference. But it is, simultaneously, an exploration of the shared.

Fighting, gesturing, swimming: sisters and bears alike do these things. And a call for valiant deeds might be a call for simple acceptance. A fracture is not necessarily a break.

Should the broken - the Other - be reshaped?

"It was the shame Teacher conveyed, by trying to fix things. He wanted to shout that these things were just broken. He wanted her to understand about the pride of broken things."

Or should the Other simply be allowed to be?

“'The world is perfect in its own way. As perfect as anything.'”

Perhaps there is a risk in either case: one might exploit, but one might also overlook possibilities.

Perhaps they are merely versions of the same story. Perhaps all the broken bits of some other story have simply been reassembled.

Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer is ringmaster and dancing bear, orchestrator and performer. All the Broken Things is enchanting and painfully real, truth dressed in a charade. ( )
1 vote buriedinprint | May 28, 2014 |
What a disappointing book! The plot, outlandish at best, might have been interesting with some gripping themes such as the impacts of Agent Orange and of the Vietnam War itself, had the characters not been so flat and linear. Bo, as the main character, seems to have only one emotion: anger, and the people who ebb in and out are so secondary that the reader has no chance to get to know them. They seem to reside in the outskirts of Bo's blinders, mere shadows to his obsessions.
Had Bo evolved or learned anything from his ordeals, I might have developed some kind of sympathy, but as it is, I left him in the last chapter with no friends, no home, no family and I just didn't care.
There are glimmers of potential here and there, and the light, quick read makes this book accessible entertainment, but its value stops there. ( )
  Cecilturtle | Apr 6, 2014 |
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A novel of exceptional heart and imagination about the ties that bind us to each other, broken and whole, from one of the most exciting voices in Canadian fiction.      September, 1983. Fourteen-year-old Bo, a boat person from Vietnam, lives in a small house in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto with his mother, Thao, and his four-year-old sister, who was born severely disfigured from the effects of Agent Orange. Named Orange, she is the family secret; Thao keeps her hidden away, and when Bo's not at school or getting into fights on the street, he cares for her.      One day a carnival worker and bear trainer, Gerry, sees Bo in a streetfight, and recruits him for the bear wrestling circuit, eventually giving him his own cub to train. This opens up a new world for Bo--but then Gerry's boss, Max, begins pursuing Thao with an eye on Orange for his travelling freak show. When Bo wakes up one night to find the house empty, he knows he and his cub, Bear, are truly alone. Together they set off on an extraordinary journey through the streets of Toronto and High Park. Awake at night, boy and bear form a unique and powerful bond. When Bo emerges from the park to search for his sister, he discovers a new way of seeing Orange, himself and the world around them.    All the Broken Things is a spellbinding novel, at once melancholy and hopeful, about the peculiarities that divide us and bring us together, and the human capacity for love and acceptance.

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