Kings of Broken Things

Written by Theodore Wheeler

Narrated by Christopher Lane

With characters depicted in precise detail and wide panorama—a kept-woman’s parlor, a contentious interracial baseball game on the Fourth of July, and the tragic true events of the Omaha Race Riot of 1919—Kings of Broken Things reveals the folly of human nature in an era of astonishing ambition.

During the waning days of World War I, three lost souls find themselves adrift in Omaha, Nebraska, at a time of unprecedented nationalism, xenophobia, and political corruption. Adolescent European refugee Karel Miihlstein’s life is transformed after neighborhood boys discover his prodigious natural talent for baseball. Jake Strauss, a young man with a violent past and desperate for a second chance, is drawn into a criminal underworld. Evie Chambers, a kept woman, is trying to make ends meet and looking every which way to escape her cheerless existence.

As wounded soldiers return from the front and black migrant workers move north in search of economic opportunity, the immigrant wards of Omaha become a tinderbox of racial resentment stoked by unscrupulous politicians. Punctuated by an unspeakable act of mob violence, the fates of Karel, Jake, and Evie will become inexorably entangled with the schemes of a ruthless political boss whose will to power knows no bounds.

Written in the tradition of Don DeLillo and Colum McCann, with a great debt to Ralph Ellison, Theodore Wheeler’s debut novel Kings of Broken Things is a panoramic view of a city on the brink of implosion during the course of this summer of strife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781536624434

Theodore Wheeler

Theodore Wheeler is a reporter who covers civil law and politics in Omaha, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters. His fiction has been featured in Best New American Voices, New Stories from the Midwest, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, and Boulevard and received special mention in a Pushcart Prize anthology. A graduate of the MFA program at Creighton University, Wheeler was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany; a resident of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City; and a winner of the Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. He is the author of Bad Faith, a collection of short fiction. Kings of Broken Things is his first novel.

Reviews for Kings of Broken Things

[chrisblocker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kings of Broken Things is an expansive story which constructs 1910's Omaha with great care. It explodes with moments of action and probes readers with questions of justice. There's so much going on in this story, and that is probably its greatest flaw. There are a few too many characters and plotlines with no apparent purpose.I enjoyed how Wheeler took the events of Will Brown's lynching in 1919 and crafted a story about the city. I appreciate stories where a place becomes a character. Wheeler definitely pulls that off with this story. This is a story about Jake and Karel and Evie... it's a story about a lynching and injustice and corruption... but more than anything else, it's a story about the environment that brewed such a terrible storm.

[paulagalvan-323293 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a remarkable telling of the race riots in 1918 Omaha, Nebraska, but reads more like an action-packed fiction novel. The characters are lively and flawed, descriptions of their lifestyles are raw and realistic, and the compelling facts of the politics and moralistic mood of Omaha makes the events—even the squalor—come alive on the page. Using the Great War and the influenza pandemic as a backdrop, the author, paints an authentic picture of life in 1918. At this time in our history, with Prohibition and the Great Depression on the horizon, jobs are scarce, women are not safe on the streets alone, and African-Americans are still the closest target for hatred and violence. By following the trials of Karel Miihlstein—a teenager and immigrant from Germany, Jake Strauss—a young man on the run from Jackson County, Evie Chambers—a woman of questionable morals and ethnic background, and Tom Dennison—a ruthless crime boss that runs the town, a stunning portrayal of rural America is explored. I was fascinated to learn that school and health authorities removed children suffering from rickets and malnutrition from their homes and placed them in sanitariums where they were not only healed but educated—bravo. I was also dismayed to find that politics in the eighteen century were perhaps more corrupt than they are today. This one is very informative and a great read.