To be honest, I was disappointed by this one. I don't know if it's me misremembering how good Philip Pullman's writing is, or it's because this is an earlier one of his than His Dark Materials, but I was just underwhelmed by it.

The Broken Bridge tells the story of a mixed race girl growing up in a small, Welsh village in the 1990s. One day, she finds out that her dad wasn't married to her mother, as she had thought, but instead to another woman, and he'd had a child with her, before meeting Ginny's mother (meanwhile, not having divorced the first woman). And that revelation takes up the first half of the book. It's pretty tedious, to be honest. I was expecting some fantasy aspect to the book, but there was none.

It's understandable that if you're writing about a mixed race child growing up in a small, presumably relatively isolated, village in the 90s, you're going to have to touch on racism and microaggressions at some point. That's surely to be expected. Except every time Pullman approached the subject, he managed to make a mess of it. There is some clear internalised racism going on, made especially so when Ginny, who's mother is Haitian and studied art, refers to Haitian artists as "primitives".

"The lady from Haiti? They have a lot of painters there." "Yeah," Ginny said, "primitives. Peasants. I know about them. But she wasn't like that. I can't be, either. See, once you know about Picasso and stuff, Matisse, all the modern painters, well, you can't pretend to be a peasant who's never seen them.... You're stuck, really. You can't go back; you've got to go forward. My mother, she was studying art properly, like I'm going to do." "European art," Stuart said.


Ginny, herself an aspiring artist, should surely know better than to value the European artists over another style of art, let alone refer to that different style of art (coincidentally one with non-white artists) as primitive or lesser. It also seems that Pullman is using Stuart, a white guy, to tell her that this is a dubious opinion to hold. Especially when he goes on to tell her about Haiti, from his perspective (granted it's because she doesn't know because she's never been, but couldn't she have read about it at least?).

At this point, I just gave up. Coupled with the fact that the other black character, a boy who has been adopted by white parents, refers to himself as "a white kid with a black face" - which I get is intended to reference the fact he doesn't feel like he fits in anywhere but instead feels uncomfortable coming from a white author - I just had to stop.

This is not a fantasy. This is not science fiction. This is a story of a fish out of water.

Ginny is one of the two black people in her Welsh village. She lives with her white dad and loves art. Art is life. Her mother was an artist and she feels she is carrying on the tradition.

This book is a slow build to something that is off. A mystery to be solved. The dialogue is natural. There is the usual of adults not wanting to say what really is going on and the kids having to figure things out on their own.

There is a bit of social commentary of art being different depending on your background, as in do people of color draw differently.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley. Open Road is doing the kindle edition of this previously released work.

Ginny has a problem. It’s a huge problem. She doesn’t know a great many things. She lives with her father in a town in Wales, and she is one of the few people of color in the village. She has never met her Haitian mother from who she inherits artistic skill, talent, and interest.

In many ways, while not perfect, Ginny’s life is good. But then, as is always the case in such books, something happens and things change. In this case, change is brought the visit of a woman, who sparks a desire or allows Ginny to give voice to questions.

While race is not a huge factor in the novel, it does make an appearance, or several. And yet this is not a novel about race. It’s true that Ginny does deal with racism in both a family setting and a societal setting. It is also true that she is not the only person of color to do so, yet the focus of the book is the mystery that Ginny must solve – the mystery of her past.

That mystery concerns her much loved father, and that mystery is one that is not dependent on race.

It sounds strange, perhaps. But think about, how many mass market teen and pre-teen books with a poc as hero/heroine have a race as a central theme and/or driving plot point? This book doesn’t ignore race; Ginny is called slurs, she wonders about her sense of self as a poc being raised only by a white father in a white community, and she wonders about art and race. Yet removal those conversations or change them to reflect a different minority group, and the story is about any teenager and the search for identity. It’s refreshing really.

It’s true at some points one feels that Ginny’s mother as passionate outsider is a bit of an over played trope (poc is passionate, white family is passionless), yet Pullman does not go down that tired old road.

In terms of the mystery that Ginny solves, too say too much about it would give away major spoilers. Much of the mystery plot does work, and there are one or two places where disbelief does need to be suspended a little.

And yes, this book does pass the Bechdel test. Ginny’s best friend is Rhiannon and why they do at times talk about boys, they talk about more. The two girls have a great and real friendship. It is one of the charms of the book. Ginny is not the only good woman/girl in a world of men. She has female friends and they act female as opposed to men with boobs.

There are wonderful touches in the book – in particular with Ginny’s interest in art and how it manifests in a variety of ways. There are some wonderful passages about the scenery and places, in particular Ginny’s kingdom – a passage that details a very real connection to places.

Highly recommended.

I gave up on this after reading about 15% of it. It simply didn't hold my attention.