The story “Broken” is very unusual and at the same time can be close to many. It’s about us, about what we can be in this or that situation, closing ourselves in our shells, filling our hearts with epoxy, just so as not to recognize ourselves and not feel pain. Everything is great when our little worlds are built and we fit into them with a healthy indifference to the surrounding reality, but what if certain circumstances expose you to the point of impossibility, turn your soul inside out and you become disgusted with yourself? Something described above happened to the hero of the book, Alex, whose life turned upside down the moment he saw a flower similar to Japanese sakura descending from heaven (so he thought). I would describe the broken genre as a “psychological thriller,” but essentially it is “science fiction,” and if you omit some chapters from the book, it can be passed off as mysticism.