A huge thank you to Random House Kids for sending me a copy of this book!
"I'd never seen a girl with skin like mine"
Every once in a while a book comes along that makes it hard to breathe. It slowly brings up memories of the years you have tried to forget. I was never proud of what I had done in the past. I was never okay with the scars that I gave myself. Yet promptly after closing this book, I took a step back and realize: I am okay and I am not ashamed of myself. Scars connect us to each other and our pasts. Without our pasts, we would not be allowed a better and brighter future for ourselves.
This book follows a girl named Charlotte (Charlie) Davis and her road to recovery after inflicting endless pain upon herself due to all her losses. The road is rough and long, with stumbling and falling, but she finds a way to survive even with her dark past.
Kathleen Glasgow's writing is emotional and truthful, never dancing around the painful events that come with life like homelessness, abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. The connection she builds between characters is a strong and reveals that we are all connected. The characters are all flawed in their own ways, some worse than others, but it reminds me that no one is perfect despite how much they seem to be.
I was at first hesitant to read this book. The amount of cliche mental health books out there is overwhelming, but GIRL IN PIECES is nothing like that. The main love interest, Riley, for the most part is awful towards Charlie due to alcoholism and his drug addiction. The cliche plot of the boy "saving" the girl or vice versa is out of question. It doesn't end entirely happy yet, but I am certain that there is a happy ending for everyone. No matter how messed up they seem to be.
