The Break

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of sexual assault, addiction, and racism against Indigenous people.

Beginning with Stella’s perspective, the narrator positions her as almost completely independent from the other women in her family despite their close bonds with each other. Although she appears to be closed off from her family, Stella is a rounded character due to the complexity of her past and her struggle to identify herself both within and outside of her family. One of her first thoughts is how “[her] hands look like her mom’s did, older-looking hands for a young woman. Old-lady hands. Her Kookom had hands like this too” (7). Right away, Vermette positions Stella as part of both her mother and grandmother, as though she does not exist independently from them even if she is physically not with them. In this moment, she refers to both of them in the past tense, even though her Kookom is still alive, which nevertheless indicates a lack of closeness between them. As the novel progresses, Stella unravels how much guilt she feels for not being involved with her family anymore and for witnessing but not intervening in Emily’s sexual assault.