The Bowl Is Already Broken
2005
First Published
3.50
Average Rating
432
Number of Pages
Promise Whittaker, the diminutive but decisive acting director of the Museum of Asian Art, is pregnant again—and that's just the beginning of her problems. Her mentor, the previous director, has suddenly quit, and is on a dig in China's Taklamakan Desert. Her favorite curator has dropped a priceless porcelain bowl, once owned by Thomas Jefferson, down the museum's steps. Another colleague has been embezzling from the museum to pay for her fertility treatments. And her far too handsome ancillary director is clearly up to no good. Promise's offbeat efforts to hold everything together make her a character who, in the words of the Newark Star-Ledger, "you'll be falling in love with before you've turned the first page."
Avg Rating
3.50
Number of Ratings
222
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
31%
3 STARS
29%
2 STARS
15%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads
Author
Mary Kay Zuravleff
Author · 5 books
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of four novels. Her latest, American Ending, was praised by Alice McDermott as "wholly fresh and achingly believable." Her third book, Man Alive!, was a Washington Post Notable Book, and the New York Times called her second, The Bowl Is Already Broken, "a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world's bickering and scheming." The Frequency of Souls, her first book, won the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Jones Award. She grew up in Oklahoma City and has made Washington, D.C., her home. She has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian and taught writing just about everywhere.
