Title: Girl in Pieces
Author: Kathleen Glasgow
Pages: 416
Year: 2016
Publisher: Delacorte (Random House)
Time taken to read: 5 days
Rating: 3/5
Goodreads synopsis: 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.
I read an excerpt from this in the Buzz Books 2016 YA fall/winter edition, and I was really excited for it to come out. The majority of the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, but I’m not sure I agree with them. For the most part, I enjoyed reading this, but I was really frustrated with Charlie. It was painful for me to watch her make poor decisions over and over. I felt bad for her, but that was really all I could feel because there was so much going on. I think it’s amazing that writers are tackling difficult issues like self-harm and abuse, but I also think the messages that these books need to send are far more effective if a writer tackles on issue at a time. I was so overwhelmed by all the crap in Charlie’s life that it didn’t leave me much space to really think about the issues at hand. None of the events or the issues really mean anything to me, and it’s hard to connect with Charlie. I thought Riley was a terrible person but a pretty good character. I really enjoyed hating him, and I was thrilled every time he f***ed up even worse, because then I could hate him more. His sister Julie is the best person in this book and she honestly deserves an award.
A lot of people on Goodreads are comparing this to Girl, Interrupted, which didn’t even occur to me until I read some reviews because this is fiction and Susanna Kaysen’s book is not. And then I realized, the portion of this book that takes place in a psych ward is exactly like Girl, Interrupted. Like, Blue is Lisa, and Louisa is Daisy. That bothers me a bit because it feels like Glasgow kind of stole not only from Kaysen’s book but from her life. Truthfully, the scenes in the hospital were my favorite, and I wish the book would have stayed there longer, but maybe with some more original characters. Unlike a lot of reviewers, I did enjoy the writing style. I particularly liked the tiny recurring chapters where it was just a paragraph of Charlie’s thoughts with a lot of words in italics. That makes no sense unless you’ve read the book, but if you have, you know what I mean. For some reason those paragraphs felt like the way I think a lot. I read one review, though, that said that this book seemed to be more like a creative writing exercise than an actual book, which I feel is really accurate.
I think if you’re interested in YA books on mental health, I would give this one a go. It’s a good one to analyze and compare to other books on the topic. I want to say that you shouldn’t expect it to be all that great, but so many people seem to love it, so who knows.
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