Broken by David Burton

Katherine Gregory’s mother is dead and Katherine is finding it hard to mourn her. Never really close to her, her little brother inherited the estate and Katherine received nothing in the will. So she was very surprised when, three days before her twenty-fifth birthday, she gets a letter from her mother that has a key to a safety deposit box full of documents; documents that prove that Katherine was adopted to keep her brother from being the oldest child who would die when he turned 25. This curse would fall on Katherine instead, as it had the firstborn of every generation going back five generations. 

Katherine and her friend Chris fly to England to visit her Aunt Marigold to try to find some answers about the curse and what it means for her. She has been seeing little green people all her life, her mother has had her believe she is insane and had her on medication. Aunt Marigold tells her that she is not insane, that she sent the little man to her, that she sent Chris to her, and that she needs to… Then she dies without explaining further. 

Katherine has to unravel the mystery about who she is using magical emerald earrings, Chris, and an old ex-boyfriend name Jonathan as she races across the English countryside one step ahead of the blonde woman who wants to kill her as she has killed Katherine’s family before her.

David Burton has created a tight, wonderfully woven tale of fairy courts, time travel, and special powers in Broken. A richly imagined novella, the story does not lag at any point and I became very interested in how Katherine was going to find out what was behind the Gregory family curse and what happened to her father, grandfather, and great-grandfathers. The ending was a twist I was not expecting, which was quite a nice surprise and left me wondering if Burton didn’t have another book in this world coming out. Broken is a fun novella and an easy read.