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Back Unbreak Me Save as PDF
Chapters (43)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-one
  24. Twenty-two
  25. Twenty-three
  26. Twenty-four
  27. Twenty-five
  28. Twenty-six
  29. Twenty-seven
  30. Twenty-eight
  31. Twenty-nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-one
  34. Thirty-two
  35. Thirty-three
  36. Thirty-four
  37. Epilogue
  38. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  39. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  40. Readers Guide
  41. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
  42. About the Author
  43. What’s next onyour reading list?

And last and very most, thanks to Katie Golding (aka Goldnox), my partner in this whole writing journey. For helping with every sentence and every hard day and being excited about every tiny milestone with me. For having to build an autocorrect shortcut into your phone to save your thumbs because we were celebrating about this book deal for so many days in a row. From A Modest Proposal to fanfic to signing multi-book deals in the same year, we’ve done all of this together, and we’ve pulled off every long-shot dream we dared to have. We did it, girl. We really, really did it.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All the details I used for LJ and his friends’ experiences after Hurricane Katrina are taken from true stories. I wish I could say they weren’t true, and that those things had never happened.

The grocery store in the Lower Ninth is real, as is the date that it opened: November 2014. The man who opened it has paid for it with his life savings, which he saved up from a lot of working-class jobs. Frequently running it at a loss, he’s done an incredible job of trying to provide this neighborhood with the goods that it needs. The portrayal of it in this book is fictional, and meant to highlight the desperation of the circumstances in the Lower Ninth even many years after the flood, but Burnell Cotlon should be commended for everything he’s done to stock the shelves of that store.

The episode with the police shooting a supposed “looter” is based on the death of Henry Glover. The officers in question were convicted of various charges for the incident and jailed, though the appeals and retrial process for each of them continue to be contentious and politically charged even now, thirteen years later. Many believe the white officers have escaped consequences for their actions due to the racially charged nature of the crime.

During the hurricane, several white people in Algiers Point started shooting black people on sight. The “shooting anything darker than a paper bag” was taken from a direct quote of a man who was charged with the unprovoked shooting of three people. His trial was delayed over a dozen times before he finally pled guilty in 2018.

After Katrina, I read accounts of people unable to locate family members for up to eighteen months. Some friends never saw each other again and never knew if the other had lived or died. Around seven hundred people are still unaccounted for to this day.

Readers Guide

Readers Guide

Unbreak Me

Michelle Hazen

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Do you think food can be healing? If so, which is more nurturing: the enjoyment of consuming the food or the process of preparing it?

2. Why do you think Andra opened up more to LJ than to any other man, or even to her friends and family who she had known her whole life?