Awards
These awards humble me deeply. They belong not only to me, but also to my sisters who demonstrated tremendous courage and faith in the telling of their stories. They are also a testament to the power of all women who overcome adversity in their lives. For this, I am humbled and eternally grateful.
WINNER 2025 INSPIRING WOMEN AWARD - Best of LA Awards
ENDURING LIGHT CATEGORIES - Inspiration - Gold Metal
Publishers Weekly
Editor's Pick
New York City Big Book Award
Winner - New Nonfiction
Independent Press Award
Distinguished Favorite
REVIEWS
PublishersWeekly Book Life Review - EDITOR'S PICK
Lane’s inspiring debut highlights the power of resilience and family bonds amid crushing burdens. In it, Lane shares the trials she and her 10 sisters endured in their abusive childhood, starting with her painful memories—at just three years old—of the siblings being split up, with Lane and her sister Kay going to Bernard and Leonarda Pisciotta’s foster home. She chronicles the decades of searching it required to reunite the siblings, a triumph that finally occurred 43 years later, and notes the pain of her journey: “If I had been writing a novel based on our lives, it would have been easier to complete. But this is a true story,” she professes.
As the sisters begin to knit their lives back together, Lane’s writing evolves as well, fusing their horrific memories of abuse and domestic violence into an anthem of healing. Those accounts are difficult to read, as the individual stories spill over with pain: at least one sister was sexually abused by a priest in an orphanage, and Lane’s own foster family was fraught with abuse. “Leonarda had given Kay and me to Bernard to appease his anger,” she writes, “[and] Bernard was an angry, powerful, and mean god. It took a lot of sacrifices to satisfy him.”
Lane recounts how each sister transformed their pain into strength, detailing her own efforts to commit her experiences to paper and her urgency to reveal the truth of the siblings’ varied circumstances. Her ability to process such trauma is striking, as is her determination to bring her long-fractured family peace; she credits God with that resilience and encourages others to believe they, too, can be delivered from the pain of their past. Readers will feel the despair and ultimate hope alongside Lane and her sisters, crafted through beautifully resolute prose, as these 11 abused children manage to transcend their nightmarish pasts and rediscover life’s meaning.
Takeaway: Faith-filled account of a journey from abuse to hope.
Comparable Titles: Daniella DeChristopher’s Behind Closed Doors, Scarlett Jones’s Just A Girl.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
Writer's Digest Review
It is astonishing that all 11 of the sisters survived their childhood abuse and abandonment to overcome their trauma and became competent, successful parents themselves. The chapter quotes perfectly introduce the reader to the oncoming information and stories of each sister. Lane is to be highly commended for her perseverance in pursuing each sister’s individual story. Her writing pulls the reader into the emotions and depth of the trauma each sister experienced at such young ages from their parent's behavior and their foster care. Her sharing of the “knowingness” and the psychic tendencies that ran through the family including her father, is also important to their connection to each other and to the story. The research, travel involved, recording of each sister’s words, including the author’s personal story are riveting. Details and descriptions create excellent images for the reader. Photos of the sisters express a joy finally achieved. Broken Water is a powerful, compelling story that reveals the failure of orphanages and foster care of years past. It reinforces the need for close inspections of children who live in foster care or boarding schools today. This book was impossible to put down until I finished reading every word.
Online Book Club Review
Review of Broken Water
Post by Alissa Deann Devargas » 09 Nov 2024, 04:05
[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Broken Water" by Barbara Lane.]
5 out of 5 stars
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Child sexual abuse is a crime that seriously needs to be checked. Not only does this affect the development of the child, it also leaves a lasting mark that is difficult to erase. While reading this book, Broken Water, by Barbara Lane, I came to learn more about the effects of this malady from the stories of her eleven sisters. This is a memoir of eleven sisters who were lost to each other for forty-three years.
Barbara remembers very little of their stay with their parents because she was among the youngest of the eleven girls. She remembered a little about their life in the orphanage, the kindness she was shown there, and how protective her sisters were of her. However, her nightmares began when she and her immediate elder sister, Kay, were assigned to the foster home of Bernard and Leonarda. While there, they gave off the perfect picture of a happy family; in fact, their picture was posted in the newspaper to encourage foster care. However, Bernard was an evil man who secretly worked for the mafia. He easily flew into a rage and beat her and her sister. To add it all, he sexually abused both Barbara and her sister, Kay. For many years, they suffered this. My heart skipped when Leonarda even asked Kay to sleep with Bernard in his room while she slept with Barbara with the excuse that her arthritis made her move around a lot at night, disturbing her husband. I thought, 'How could a woman be so insensitive?'
I've read and watched very few stories that advocate foster care; most of them involve abuse in different forms. However, in those stories, those villains were caught and dealt with. So I wanted Bernard to suffer so much. After reuniting with her sisters, Barbara set out on a mission to gather their stories about what happened in their lives. That way she'd probably get answers as to why her family was broken up and scattered. If there was something I learned from these stories told by the sisters, I learned that a mother's love is very important to children. Losing it affects a child one way or another.
There was nothing to dislike about this book. It was an interesting story that fully engaged my emotions. In the beginning, I longed with Barbara to find her sisters. When they started telling their stories, I was eager to read about each of them. I must commend the author for the level of honesty that was fused into this book. She told the stories as each of the sisters related them, even if there seemed to be a mix-up. With all these considered, I rate this book 5 out of 5 stars. It's an emotionally charged book that needs to be read by nuns in orphanages, social workers, and the part of the government that deals with children in the system. That way, they can learn how to improve in their work and what to change in order to give these children better lives.
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Broken Water
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Review of Broken Water
"A distinctive, haunting tale of family, loss, and hope."