S. Paola Antonetta

Shattered

History & Biography

“His father’s business was greenhouses, and Arthur Boers’s Shattered is a memoir haunted by glass. Glass breaks in his father’s rages, yet it also illuminates and ultimately proves the truth of Boers’s words that ‘entering the world of trauma is like looking through fractured glass.’ Boers’s Dutch immigrant family brought a legacy of trauma to Canada from Nazi occupation and from customs in which ‘Boers men beat Boers sons.’ The author, a father himself and an Anglican priest, finally escapes his history. Ultimately, Shattered is a meditation on violence and family, redemption, and Eucharistic transformation. In an era as rightly concerned as ours about violence—collective, familial, natural, political—I can’t imagine a more important story.”