What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?

The grass'd been cleared away yesterday by her mother when they visited on the sixth anniversary of her death, Beth and what remained of her family; so the nameplate was clear even if the painted indentation of name, date of birth and date of death was almost bled of its white by the sun, the elements that Polly could never stop wondering if her sister could still feel, specially the rain getting in through the lid that must now be, like, rotted in or why that slump in the earth? She always came the following day for a visit on this yearly remembering; in fact Polly Heke came several times a year and done for the last two, from when she herself hit the same age as Grace'd been when she, uh, when she like killed herself.The searing, blistering power of Alan Duff's masterpiece, Once Were Warriors, rocked a nation and was acclaimed around the world. What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? is the passionate and uncompromising sequel which takes up the story of the Heke family six years after Grace's suicide.As in Once Were Warriors, the sequel is narrated by several of the characters (or told from their points of view): Jake, his wife Beth, their daughter Polly, their son Abe, a gang-member called Mulla Rota, and a rich landowner Trambert and his increasingly estanged wife. JAKE: Six years after Grace's tragic suicide, Jake is a lost man. Officially cleared of Grace's charge in her suicide note that he was the one molesting her, he is still shunned by the community that used to worship his brute strength and drinking prowess as Jake the Muss. He is down as far as he can go, but a chance meeting in a pub with some feared Maori brothers and a subsequent hunting trip makes him see another kind of future for himself and realise that only he can change his life. He takes up Rugby Union, a game worshipped by Maori and white alike, gets fit, gets a job, meets a good woman and starts questioning the kind of qualities he once admired. His new friends slowly teach him that self-control is more impressive than violence, that it's better to be respected than feared, that it requires more strength to be honest than it does to rip people off. Jake's final act in this book shows that he has learnt these lessons and is well on the way to redemption.BETH: Beth has turned her back on her old life and now lives with the man who she first met as the councillor of her son Boogie. Her beloved son Nig is dead, shot in a gang war between the Brown Fists and the Black Hawks, and his younger brother Abe looks set to go the same way. But she can make a new life for her three other children - Boogie is studying at university and Polly and Huata are being taught to hope for more for themselves - and has broken out of the miserable existence that once seemed her fate.POLLY: As the book begins, Polly is haunted by her sister's suicide. Rather than succumb to the misery like Grace did, Polly resolves with all her strength to fight her way out of poverty and ignorance, holding up Boogie as an example she is determined to follow. She watches her older brother join the Black Hawks and knows he won't survive the drugs and violence, so vows to herself to look after little Huata and make sure he has other choices.ABE: He has joined the gang, and has commited acts of robbery with violence to be accepted by the gang, but no one knows that he has done so to avenge the death of his brother. He joins the rival gang, the Black Hawks, so he can be in a position to execute the Brown Fists leader, who set up Nig, his fellow Brown Fist. The ignorance and violence Abe sees horrifies him, and he befriends a gang moll called Tania who, he discovers, used to be Nig's woman, but changed sides in protest at the way Nig was set up. When Abe witnesses Tania brutally murdered by her man and the President of the Brown Fists because she won't bow down to her boyfriend's wishes, he decides that rather than take up a gun himself, he wants them to pay for their crime in jail.MR