The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
“a warm and slyly funny look at small towns and romance . . .”
“[the] town might magically reveal itself, complete with wooden facades and women in skirts and the kind of timeless Amish-ish existence she imagined . . .”
Unfortunately for Sara, the protagonist of debut novelist Katarina Bivald’s The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, the name of the small Iowa town pretty much says it all: Broken Wheel.
After a long journey from Sweden, Sara Lindqvist is shocked to find that her book-loving American pen pal has passed away since they last communicated. Amy Harris, the deceased, was a popular resident of Broken Wheel, and the residents of the dying town step in to assure their foreign visitor will have a fruitful visit.
To that end, they help her set up a bookstore with Amy’s book collection, throw parties to publicize their town, and even toss the town’s most eligible bachelor (who coincidentally happens to be Amy’s nephew) at Sara.
It’s difficult to imagine that The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is by any stretch of the imagination intended to be realistic fiction, even of the romantic variety. In this story, Bivald has woven a genial fantasy of the outsider who is instantly beloved and inspirational to an entire town. Some might consider Sara to be the most bald-faced Pollyanna character in recent literature—she has no visible faults—but Amy’s inner monologue shows a sly, tongue-in-cheek humor that illustrates Bivald has done this intentionally.
When Sara is introduced to Travis, Amy’s nephew, she thinks about romance novels, and how they would inevitably fall in love, and laughs. Each member of the town comes to Amy with different issues and problems, and Amy has a handy-dandy book-related solution to each of them. She is a modern day Mary Poppins, handing out books instead of tablespoons of medicine, and always with a smile on her face.
Broken Wheel is Jan Karon’s Mitford novels gone a bit seedy and transported from the American South to the Midwest; quirky characters abound, “small town values” are replete, and no one is really all that bad. It’s a gentle world Bivald has constructed, and easy to like. She’s well aware that she’s working completely within small town romance tropes—again, Sara’s inner monologue often reveals (and giggles) at that—but Bivald is comfortable there.
Bivald uses small town stereotypes for her characters: the Religious Fanatic, the Plucky Do-Gooder, the Man Who Just Wants to Be Left Alone, the Alcoholic, etc., but then she tweaks each stale character just enough to make them interesting. The Religious Fanatic finds a secret weakness for gay porn and younger men; the Alcoholic is the kindest man in town; and the loner male, of course, finds that he really doesn’t want to be alone. Making these distinctions of character is not unique in popular women’s fiction, but it’s often done to point out hypocrisy or create either a melodramatic character or an object of scorn. Bivald does neither; instead, she uses her characters’ secrets to humanize them.
By illuminating the other characters’ secret sides, often through “book wisdom,” Sara becomes a sage, and The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend becomes cousin to heroic or fantastic fiction—more than a standard romance. Sara doesn’t have to be realistic, as a hero she just has to be good. Situations don’t have to be realistic, either (and good thing, because the story with the immigration officer is terribly unrealistic); they just have to be instructive and entertaining.
Putting categorization aside, though, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is gently funny, kind to every character, and a reader’s paradise of delightful asides and observations from the literature of many eras and across all tastes.
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is a warm and slyly funny look at small towns and romance, written without either the rose-colored glasses imposed by straight romantic fiction or the faux-jaded cynicism of much millennial fiction. Katarina Bivald is an author to watch.