At the conclusion of the story ‘bait’ a pathological skeptic apologizes to her flying saucer-believing brother by tying a shoelace to a stick and dunking it in the river by where they’ve just had an argument:

"There’s no obese, man-eating catfish dwell-ing in this river ... It’s all a joke. A joke on you. You’re just crazy enough to believe it." "Maybe I am crazy. Or maybe I just want to believe. At least I believe in something. You don’t believe in anything, Ellie. Not even yourself."

Ellie’s ‘fishing expedition’ gets a laugh out of her brother Toby, and is the perfect ‘ice breaker’ with which to end the story; and also ties in neatly with the title of this book: broken water. Not only does the title broken water happen literally when the tip of the lace hits the river, but it is also threaded symbolically throughout all 10 stories in idea of pain in birth and life and death; and the small epiphanies, in the interim, that unexpectedly break the surface.

Author Paula Martin Morell’s stories are told from the point of view of the two women of the family: Ellie, and her mother Elizabeth. Through these two women’s eyes, the reader gets a sampling of their family’s struggles through the years, and some of the past events that started the ball of their discontent rolling.

The story ‘deep sleep’ chronicles Elizabeth’s brief affair with her brother-in-law and the resultant conception of her son Toby; in ‘the channel’ Ellie ends up delivering her brother’s pregnant cat’s kittens in the middle of the night, surprising herself that she is strong enough to do it; ‘pieces of me’ ends up with Ellie’s mom taking a ride on the back of Mountain Man’s motorcycle while a dumbfounded Ellie wonders at the preconceptions she’s always had about her mother.

Though not as linear as novel chapters, each story in broken water builds on the next until a hodge podge picture of a larger whole is revealed. A certain detail from one story will pop up in a unique way in different story; another will challenge an assumption of one character later on. Ranging so widely in time and space and character point of view, the effect is having a partially completed puzzle the reader is given a few key parts with which to piece together the whole.