Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow

GIRL IN PIECES BY KATHLEEN GLASGOW BOOK REVIEW

Lowdown from Goodreads

Publish Date August 30, 2016

Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she’s already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don’t have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you.

Every new scar hardens Charlie’s heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts enough to not care anymore, which is sometimes what has to happen before you can find your way back from the edge.
A deeply moving portrait of a teenage girl on the verge of losing herself and the journey she must take to survive in her own skin, Kathleen Glasgow’s debut is heartbreakingly real and unflinchingly honest. It’s a story you won’t be able to look away from.

GIRL IN PIECES BY KATHLEEN GLASGOW BOOK REVIEW

I was lucky enough to meet Kathleen Glasgow at the Read Savannah event last month. She participated in a YA panel with a few other authors. Another YA author I met was Katharine Mc Gee & I loved her book, The Thousandth Floor. At Read Savannah, Kathleen was asked why she wrote this book. She answered because “the story needed to be told.” I couldn’t agree more.

MEETING CHARLIE

I devoured this book as soon as I got my hands on it. Charlie is in treatment & it’s a Girl, Interrupted type facility where the staff is attempting to help the girl’s heal with too little resources & too little time. Charlie is booted out before she is ready to tackle the world again & we see her try to navigate through this next step in her life. She has no support, moves several states away & gets a job at a coffee shop. She is TRYING- the reader knows she’s giving it all she’s got to stay healthy & stop the self-harm. Then we meet Riley, an older guy who works at the coffee shop with a damaged past. We see their relationship unfold & my god- it’s painful.

This book was hard. It was so hard to read the details of Charlie cutting herself & to imagine the hurt & pain she must have felt. As Kathleen reveals the layers of Charlie’s past, it’s uncomfortable, shocking & heartbreaking but we all know Charlie. Even if you don’t have a personal connection with self-harm, we’ve all been in pain, felt alone, screwed around by a guy, been uncomfortable in our skin, felt unsure about the future & struggled to find our own strength. There’s one part in the book where Charlie is watching Riley flirt with her friend & it felt like a kick in the stomach to relive the anguish of an unsure teenage girl.

THE VERDICT

Girl in Pieces is so incredibly beautiful, alarming, IMPORTANT & so well written. I’m thrilled I had the opportunity to meet Kathleen & thank her for her bravery & honesty in writing this for all the Charlies of the world.

Let’s connect over books! Check out our Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow Book Review on Goodreads

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More About the Author: Kathleen Glasgow

Kathleen Glasgow is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel, Girl in Pieces.

She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Girl in Pieces has been named to best of lists by The New York Public Library, Amazon, TAYSHA, Goop, TeenVogue, BN Teen, Refinery29, EW.com, TeenReads, and more. Her second young adult novel will be published by Random House/Delacorte in 2019.