In this candid guest post, author Kim Savage takes us inside the origins and art of her dark new novel, Beautiful Broken Girls.

When You Touch Things, They Can Break: How An Idea Inspired a Plot and Cover
by Kim Savage

At the end of Beautiful Broken Girls, Mira scribbles the last note she will leave for Ben to find. It contains a full confession of what her and her sister have done.

She hesitates, realizing the note reduces the sisters’ suicide to a specific incident, when the reasons go way beyond. So she grabs a lighter, burns it, and writes a new one. Here’s what we learned: When you touch things, they can break.

I begin my novels with a concept I find intriguing. In the case of Beautiful Broken Girls, it was the power of touch.

In many religions, the “laying of the hands” is an act that heals the sick through divine intervention. I wondered, if a touch can be powerful, can’t it also be misused? Can’t a touch break someone who’s fragile? What if every one of my characters was touched in some way; what would that look like?

This is probably the right time to mention I am obsessed with Catholic saints. As a girl, I tried to be one for a while, but that’s a different story.

I began writing around the idea of a touch, starting with a teen who receives signs that she might be a modern-day Catholic saint. The teen became Francesca. What if Francesca discovers she has healing powers, but can’t harness them? Touched by her god, Francesca would also have a mystical gift of touching others, for better or for worse.

From Francesca I moved to Mira. A touch can be romantic, but romantic love that leads to heartbreak can be devastating. Mira is the incarnation of this idea. She lives next door, yet to Ben she’s ethereal and quixotic. She senses Ben is wounded (more on this in a second), and comes to him, secretly and at odd moments, and leaves Ben intrigued.

What Ben doesn’t know is that Mira’s dangerous impulses are growing stronger, and that her trust in Ben is one of the last threads tying her to this world.

Ben, too, has been touched. Seven years earlier, his name appeared on a list discovered in the home of a pedophile coach; a story made public in his close-knit town. It effects Ben’s self-esteem, his trust of adults, and the way he interprets the notes Mira leaves for him.

But here’s the thing. Just as Mira realizes when she scraps that first note, the truth about touching goes well beyond one person touching another. Beautiful Broken Girls is largely about the way the characters are viewed, and the altering effect of the male gaze on them. In the first post-mortem letter Ben receives from Mira, she acknowledges that she and her sister are the objects of the neighborhood boys’ fantasies: Everyone wanted to touch us. Including you. So remember the seven places you touched me. That’s where you’ll find the truth.

If Mira and Francesca had been left untouched, without the intrusion of male romantic love, would they have stayed whole? Given her conclusion by the end of the novel—“when you touch things, they can break”—Mira seems to be saying that she and Francesca didn’t stand a chance.

Now, onto the cover…

It was important to get the cover of Beautiful Broken Girls right. I won’t lie: I was worried, mostly because early readers interpreted the book so differently (it’s about faith/blood ties/objectification/redemption). What image could capture all that?

Lucky for me, I was assigned Macmillan Art Director Beth Clark once again (she also designed the sumptuous, dead-gorgeous cover for After the Woods).

Here, Beth’s design straddles the line between eerie and provocative. The focus on hands points to the importance of touch, but it’s their placement that nails it. The chapters in Beautiful Broken Girls are named for the parts of Mira that Ben touches: Palm, hair, chest, cheek, lips, throat, and lastly, her heart.

On the cover, the right hand touches the heart; the touch that broke her.

Moreover, the hands are the only body part (we can see) not submerged in water. The suggestion is that the power of touch transcends drowning, and so death, as Ben learns by the last pages of the novel. Francesca seems to predict her own relevance after death when, about her crush, she tells Mira, “It’s always been that way for saints, since the beginning of time. He doesn’t want me while I’m living. But he’ll have me when I’m dead.”

Saints, after all, only become saints after they are martyred.

Living and dead, the girls of Beautiful Broken Girls upend all assumptions of who they are. They might be broken, but they also do the breaking. And to me, that feels powerful.

In case you’re wondering: that time I tried to become a saint? It didn’t work out.

For more information…

A former reporter who received her Master’s degree with honors in Journalism from Northeastern University, Kim Savage is the author of the critically acclaimed YA novel After the Woods. You can follow Kim on Tumblr, and Twitter, and visit her at kimsavage.me.

Beautiful Broken Girls by Kim Savage is available tomorrow on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and your local independent bookstore.