The Bowl Is Already Broken

"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 difficulties. Her mentor, the previous director, suddenly walked away from his job with no explanation, and now is on a dig somewhere in China's Taklamakan Desert. Her favorite curator has dropped their newest treasure, a porcelain bowl once owned by Thomas Jefferson, down the museum's stairs. Another colleague, desperate for a son, has been embezzling from the museum to pay for her fertility treatments. And Promise's far too handsome, far too elusive ancillary director is clearly up to no good."

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Romance. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.