Diary of the Broken by Malachi Lambert

In the dark and lonely spiral of grief following the death of his beloved wife, Aaron returns to old comforting demons, even as his friends and children try to pull him back from the brink of crushing sorrow in Diary of the Broken by Malachi Lambert, a raw and relentless tale of loss.

From the bottom of the bottle to the tops of hiking trails, Aaron gradually finds a new lease on happiness with a community who cares, but the journey to get there is marked by tears, blood, self-reflection, and more than a few hangovers. Through Aaron’s dark internal monologue, the narrative takes readers back through the struggles of his earlier life, and the turning points inspired by the love he’d lost. Emotionally charged and savagely honest, this is a visceral tale of self-destruction and unlikely salvation.

As the title implies, the writing feels ripped straight from a diary – a stream of consciousness that doesn’t always account for punctuation, sentence structure, or language redundancy, and that uninterrupted flow can sometimes make the prose a challenge to read. The dialogue formatting is inconsistent as well, and the long paragraphs of text encourage skimming, rather than true engagement. There are also doubled chunks of text, as though the author copied and pasted without giving the manuscript a final read-through.

A fairly comprehensive edit is recommended for the novel to be truly accessible to most readers, but its rawness is compellingly reflective of the main character, and the story has serious potential in terms of timeless themes and lessons.