![]() I loved Charlie because she fights on every. I wanted to reach into my Kindle and give Charlie the biggest hug of her life. I can’t remember the last time I found myself rooting for a character so fiercely. Okay, I swear I’m done ranting about the design. However, in the ARC I received, these ‘pieces’ were separated by ‘cuts’ similar those on the cover, which felt a) uber obvious and b) in poor taste. I thought this enhanced Charlie’s voice and drew the reader deeper into her world. It’s narrated in fragments of varying length: short snippets when Charlie feels overwhelmed and scattered, with longer, flowing passages when she feels more in control. ![]() ![]() Yes, Girl in Pieces features characters who self-harm but avoids reading like an issues-based story, as Glasgow builds her narrative around Charlie’s character rather than her illness. Because, guys, this book is awesome. One of my fave YA reads this year (along with Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue and Kirsty Eagar’s Summer Skin. I want to make a point about the cover and the title because they almost kept me from reading Girl in Pieces, and I would hate for other readers to miss out on this book for the same reason. Side note: I’m a much bigger fan of the Australian cover. Just in case you missed the hint in the title, we added some blood red slashes on a fleshy-pink background! I received a US ARC of the book, and the cover further deepened my suspicions that Girl in Pieces would be primarily a story designed to educate its reader about capital-I Issues. The title sounds like that of a Degrassi High episode about self-harm, which wasn’t a great start. In high school, I was completely obsessed with both Kaysen’s memoir and the 1999 film adaptation, and because I’m a total sucker for ‘if you like this, try this’ comparisons, I was peachy keen to read Girl in Pieces. HarperCollins, who publish the title here in Australia, have hailed Girl in Pieces as ‘A Girl, Interrupted for a new generation’ (although, it’s worth noting that while Glasgow discusses her experiences with mental illness in her author’s note, Girl in Pieces is fiction, while Girl, Interrupted is non-fiction). However, not everyone she meets has her best interests at heart and building a new life isn’t as easy as it seems. She gets a job washing dishes at a local cafe, finds a room to rent and even starts to make a few friends. When an old friend offers her his apartment in Tucson while his band’s on tour, Charlie readily accepts. When her grandmother’s insurance (which is paying for her hospital stay) is abruptly cut off, well before Charlie feels ready to rejoin the wider world, she doesn’t know what to do. The only way she knows how to cope is by hurting herself, but she’s determined not to fall back into destructive habits. She has no home and no support network, just a head full of bad memories from losing her best friend and trying to survive on the streets. When seventeen-year-old Charlotte wakes up in hospital following a violent suicide attempt, her life is in pieces. 2016) is a raw and intimate portrait of a young woman learning to live again. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, Kathleen Glasgow’s Girl in Pieces (Delacorte Press, Aug.
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