The Broken Weathervane
Laura DeNooyer
Scrivenings Press LLC (2025)
ISBN: 978-1649174963
Reviewed by Demetria Head for Reader Views (12/2025)
The Broken Weathervane by Laura DeNooyer is literary fiction where readers are introduced to a woman who seems to be standing at a crossroads. She has ambition, but also buried family history and unresolved personal trauma. Her name is Leslie Wickersham, and her life feels like it’s hanging between her hard-won job opportunity as Grants Officer at Raymond University, her narcissistic ex-husband, Vic, and a secret lineage that ties her to a celebrated American author. This sets an interesting tone for the professional and personal stakes to come.
The story gets off to a comical start with Leslie, now the Grants Officer and the person tasked to drag a reluctant Dr. Greg Stafford into the modern age of community engagement via social media. He is openly resistant to the idea. But there are also power struggles going on when he meets her ideas to make his grant proposal more concrete, with sarcasm, elitism, and this performative impatience. I immediately imagined a scene with a gatekeeper going toe to toe with what he perceives as an outsider. Leslie finds herself trying to prove she belongs there while Dr. Stafford does everything to prove that she doesn’t. But she does something amazing in response to his resistance; she learns how to wield power.
Character development is one of the novel’s strengths. DeNooyer did a great job painting each character. Leslie appears put together on the outside but she’s in a survivor mindset, her confidence is practiced, not natural and we see it early on when she’s focused on what people might think about a post she made or replaying interactions in her head, but the one critical thing that stood out for me was when she made the “washed up at thirty-five” comment about herself.
She wants her emotionally abusive ex out of her life, yet he’s still taunting her on his new number. He creates the pressure-cooker stakes with his demands of extortion. Greg Stafford is dismissive, sarcastic, and resistant, but in the classroom, he’s a savior who gets his students to think. I guess he’s more selective about where and to whom he performs humanity. So we have quite a bit emerging from Greg using his academic power, to Oma (Klara) representing family power as Leslie’s sweet grandma, and when she hands off the journal to Leslie, it doesn’t merely serve as a plot device, but more of a turning point.
DeNooyer did well with all of the time jumps. I especially found the jump back to 1952 interesting because we learned more about family secrets and dysfunctions, and it was just unsettling, but made me feel protective of Oma (Klara) all of a sudden. As the story progresses, it begins to feel like a gut-punch, especially when it exposes who has the power, who loses it, and who gets labeled when everything goes all wrong. Jumping back to 1952, it shifts to the fear around a pregnancy, institutional control, and the brutal reality of mental health care during a time period characterized by cold sheet packs, isolation, and experimental drugs. I felt so angry in this moment. But DeNooyer really knows how to drop the floor out from under us. There are heartbreaking moments, tender moments, and morally complicated ones. But I love the fact that DeNooyer doesn’t flatten any of the characters into saint roles or villain roles.
The Broken Weathervane is a fusion of historical fiction, contemporary women’s fiction, and a literary mystery. The multiple timelines expose a range of secrets, from family history to a literary legacy and a late-blooming romance, but it’s also about truth, no matter how deferred. I found myself really connecting to this novel. Readers who will appreciate it most are those who’ve read similar works, such as The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller or Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth.