Girl in Pieces ~ Kathleen Glasgow (earc) review [@kathglasgow @randomhousekids]

Girl in Pieces
Delacorte Press
August 30, 2016
416 pages
add to Goodreads/buy from Book Depository/or Amazon

For fans of Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen Reasons Why, and All the Bright Places comes Kathleen Glasgow’s debut novel about a girl who has lost everything—almost even herself.

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 really is achingly painful and heartbreaking read but beautiful, as well. Kathleen Glasgow tells the story in a really fantastic way. In the beginning we have the barest of explanations for how Charlotte, Charlie, came to be in the hospital. Her history, that story, is revealed to the reader slowly as we get to know Charlie. Not knowing all of the 'what' really makes you focus on Charlie, all that she's feeling and going through and you absolutely connect with her. It is much more emotional seeing how she's reacted to things what she did or thought or felt, when you don't know exactly what it was. You're relying solely on how it impacted her.

I so just wanted Charlie to have a friend. A real, true, good, honest, caring friend who had their stuff together and would be good for her. She has to go through so much - because of crap people, because of bureaucracy,  because of her own bad choices, because of others and I wanted to find some way to make it better for her.

Yet, I maybe also loved it because she didn't have that guiding, supporting force to assist her. It was so much up to Charlie - truly a herculean task for a seventeen-year-old girl with so few resources and her past - that you rejoiced at every triumph and despaired at every setback that much more.

Charlie's journey is hard and it's painful, their are bad choices (some of them so incredibly well explained that I understood Charlie and her thought processes more than I thought I could) but it's all so very honest and real.

This was a book I didn't want to finish (I didn't want it to be over, to have no more of Charlie's story or Glasgow's writing to read) but that I couldn't stop reading. I loved it.

This book (to quote the book) is, "f***ing angelic." Please go read it.

(On a side note, the letter in the beginning, from the editor, reinforced why those letters are one of my absolute favorite things about arc's.)