Girl in Pieces
2000
- children's fiction
- emotions, fiction
- survival, fiction
- homeless persons, fiction
- child sexual abuse, fiction
- self-mutilation, fiction
- emotional problems
- survival
- abandoned children
- fiction
The story
Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At 17 she's already lost more than most people do 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 girl in a world that owes her nothing, and has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together. Kathleen Glasgow's debut is heartbreakingly real and unflinchingly honest. It's a story you won't be able to look away from.
What it’s like
Raw, close first-person prose that stays in the mind of a damaged teenager, sharp and fragmentary in places and tender in others, with a bleak urban setting of cramped apartments, bus stops, homeless shelters and the grey shoulder of a river that never quite leaves the frame. Its vibe is wintry grief with a thread of stubborn hope: the kind of book that sits heavy on a rainy afternoon or a long, lonely evening when you want company in the dark rather than comfort. Pacing is uneven by design, lurching between numb flat stretches and sudden flashes of memory, and the emotional register is unsparing, built around a girl learning to stop hiding from her pain. Intensity is high: self-harm is depicted in detail and is central throughout, child sexual abuse and drug use are referenced and dealt with directly, there is poverty, neglect and some violence, and the tone is more devastating than gratuitous. Not a gentle read. It suits readers who want honest, unflinching YA about survival and recovery, and who can handle depictions of self-injury and abuse.
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