Reviewed by Alexander
TITLE: The Shattered Door
AUTHOR: Brandon Witt
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 11 hours, 51 minutes
NARRATOR: Andrew McFerrin
BLURB:
After a tortured childhood and years of soul-searching, Brooke Morrison has finally settled into a comfortable life. While his sexuality prohibits him from practicing his degree in youth ministry in a church setting, he has found a fulfilling job as a youth counselor at a residential treatment facility in Colorado. He falls in love, marries the man of his dreams, and makes peace with God. He’s happy.
Then his buried past drags him back to the Ozarks.
The life Brooke has worked so hard to build is crumbling in his hands in the face of painful memories and past abuse, and his confidence is withering. In El Dorado Springs, where his nightmares come to life, Brooke desperately seeks closure life doesn’t offer. Brooke must find value in himself, in his marriage, and in the world around him – and create the hope and perseverance to keep his past from swallowing him whole.
REVIEW:
I must begin by saying that the blurb of The Shattered Door is perfect. It accurately describes the basics of the story and the tone that we, the reader can expect from the book. That being said, I am glad I started listening to the book early because I had to frequently stop and regroup before starting again. I also found myself yelling at Brooke and some of the secondary characters quite frequently, which is good because I was emotionally invested, and bad, because they were driving me nuts!
I have to wonder what I was thinking when I selected The Shattered Door for review. The subject matter was intense, the situations frustrating and then, as I soon found out, the story focused on both the above, as well as quite a bit of mundane, everyday life. Now I am a fan of realism in contemporary fiction, but have to say that other than going to the bathroom, I was treated to every single solitary other daily activity you could possibly imagine, which at about the halfway point, started to get tedious.
McFerrin was a good choice as narrator, giving the entire cast of characters distinctive, and unique voices. The production was good, but I found that while the spoken pace was perfect, McFerrin sped from sentence to sentence, not leaving a suitable pause between thoughts. This was particularly irritating when the missed pause affected the dialogue between two characters, making it challenging to tell where one character’s thought or dialogue ended, and the other began.
I am truly torn about The Shattered Door, as you can well imagine from my review, but in the end, it was a well written book that tried to give an in-depth look at coming home, illness, unhealthy family dynamics, and how our chosen family can be the most important part of surviving life when surrounded by hostility on a daily basis.
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