Beyond a Broken Sky
Beyond a Broken Sky is a dual-narrative novel in which a woman in a later time stream researches the life of a woman in an earlier time stream and in so doing resolves some of her own personal difficulties. Sound familiar?
I sometimes feel as though we are living in an endless creative writing competition in which every author has to submit a novel with the same basic plot. The room for originality gets progressively smaller, especially if the earlier time stream involves a tragic WW2 love story.
In Fortin’s latest novel, the woman in the later time stream (2022) is Rhoda, an expert in stained glass, who is called to a chapel in Somerset which is about to be demolished, to acquire the windows for her museum. In the course of a site visit, her host’s dog uncovers a shallow grave, obviously of a murder victim. The story thus becomes a whodunnit, except that everybody in the locality seems to know who did it, and they conspire to try to frighten off Rhoda and her boyfriend.
The woman in the earlier era is Alice, a village girl who falls pregnant by an American airman in the last year of the war. She is sent away to Somerset to have the baby, but before it is born she has fallen in love with an Italian POW, thus bringing together two favourite WW2 romantic tropes. Both time streams are well told, and each builds up to a dramatic denouement. There is life in the genre yet.
Be warned that a novel with almost the same title, Beyond This Broken Sky, was published last year (Siobhan Curham, Bookouture). It too is a dual narrative story featuring a tragic WW2 romance, but this one is about the London Blitz.
