Book Review: Break in Case of Emergency

Break in Case of Emergency
by Brian Francis
Pub Date: 04 Feb 2020

Read courtesy of NetGalley.com

First, I don't get the title; although, I get what the author wanted me to get from the title. It just didn't work. Even the addition of Trisha's egg gift to Toby didn't make the title any more relevant. I almost feel like the title is the opposite of what the author intended. 

Rural, conservative Canada... and a homophobic town. That's the setting. It was pretty one dimensional. I couldn't get past the characterizations and dialogue as stereotypical rather than as prose. The people in Toby's life are afraid to talk about everything: her mother's suicide, her father's abandonment, sex... They taught her to be humiliated by her parents. OK, I know that's how characterization occurs, but the turnaround time on the undoing of years of silence occurred quite quickly once Toby herself tries to commit suicide.

Toby's friendship with Trisha is seen from Toby's point-of-view, a skewed portrayal of a shallow, not-very-supportive long-time friend. Trisha seems to both protect and rip on Toby simultaneously; it feels superficial. And Trisha uses the phrase "bitch mom" when talking to Toby about Trisha's mother, but no where in the story does Mrs. Richardson get portrayed that way. 

Suicide isn't meant to be logical, and the author doesn't make it so. That's a good thing. Toby's justifications for committing suicide herself make that lack of logic clear. The only reason she offered that gave me pause was by asserting that people (she) loved her mom more when she was dead than when she was alive. It struck home for me how people convince themselves that others would be better off without them. But other reasons given felt more like exaggerations of teen drama. I don't know enough about suicide to know the accuracy of the reasons or if it was just the writing that didn't work for me. On the other hand, having Toby later be made to actually think about herself as one day being old felt like a genuine response to make to someone who attempted suicide.

I was taken aback by how quickly Toby turned around from thinking how she could try to commit suicide again to thinking there might actually be hope. It seemed to occur in one afternoon. Not only that, but that one afternoon also swayed her grandmother Kay to accept Toby's father again after years of animosity. The time frame for this turnaround was not realistic. It detracted from Toby's believability as a character.

I wanted to like this book more than I did, but I don't. I'm not sure how useful it would be in a YA collection in a community where teen suicides occur, especially since the repair of this character's psyche occurred in the snap of a finger... the egg shell never got broken (a-ha! Maybe that's what the title meant? There was never a second emergency?)