GIRL IN PIECES (Review)
Kathleen Glasgow
Girl in Pieces is a book I started with great anticipation. The concepts the book attempts to portray are extremely complex and need their own focus. The book alluded to many unspoken episodes of the human spirit, our endless urge to always be in the same state of ugliness, and the many times we have tried to overcome this pressure and still feel the dullness.
The degree of progress and extreme relapse are well illustrated throughout the book. It is a book to heal and be healed, to uplift the inner spirit of the unknown. Each woman herself is a story, and that story is her being in the fire of normalcy. The women living in their world of confusion, a broken home, a broken heart, and broken relationships are the themes highlighted in this book and it will bring a sense of awareness to all readers who have a past.
As we gather the pieces of Charlie Davis, we will find holes in many. No matter how much we try to settle the puzzle of her, it always ends up unfinished. With a lot of corollary situations throughout the life of a seventeen-year-old broken girl, and to find a radical reason is out of reach.
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A girl who was treated as no one by her mother had the love to slap and hit her daughter because of her own ruptured life. So, Charlie grew up ruptured and with brazen fear.
When you are denied the luxury of a home, you become what your surroundings want you to become. When you are denied assurance from your mother, you become unsure of yourself. Diverging your direction into the wrong, followed by the level of grievances.
Charlie is a cutter; she heals through damage of her own. The story begins with Charlie in rehab, not talking but listening to self-healing sessions. With her body and mind filled with fine lines from the cutting, Charlie, with her long-sleeve shirt, tells us about the past without actually telling. The story of her before the rehab is not narrated deeply; the writers give us the handle for imagination in describing the shattered life of Charlie. The situations she meets and the circumstances of her behavior all contribute to the untold story of her life. The part of Ellis, her best friend, her only friend, their unfinished relationship split in the middle, and blue, Casper Mikey, all have their own space in the story, and how each of them gives Charlie a piece of themselves for her to become who she was.
The relationship that heats up between Riley and Charlie encompasses many issues. Riley, who himself was an uncouth drug addict and an ex-band songwriter with a past, becomes the one Charlie falls in love with. The way the relationship between the two builds up was good to read, but we know how unpredictable they both were and how hurt they were that this was not going to end well.
We have this behavior of keeping it in the shell. We try to find ourselves in the other person, and we drag them into the fight with us. Riley was just as destroyed as Charlie when she met him at the coffee shop and he offered her a job washing dishes. With each development in their relationship, we know it’s not going to end pleasantly. When a person with trauma lives a normal life, they tend to turn it upside down because they are not used to being normal, and that scares them. This normality scares them and they try again to return to their damage.
The detailing of events and the story unfurling into its pace are interesting, but the emotion of the story is unfelt. Yes, we do understand her pain and trauma; the author was successful in portraying these elements to us, yet I feel incomplete; the story as it moves along lost its emotional carriage. A few more deeply injurious scenes could have been added. It somehow failed to hold my emotional attention. I feel for Charlie, but I couldn’t mourn for her; the words didn’t hit me in the heart. The levels of her disturbance could have been written a bit more intensely, as many of the scenes were predictable. As the line starts, we know how the situation is going to end up; somewhere, the writing is what keeps me going.
The story tells the tale of so many people who hide their identities under their shirt sleeves because others think this is absurd and they don’t want to be eluded any more than they already are. Charlie is one example of many. The author’s self is a victim of self-damage, and this story is a flavor of her journey as well. There are a lot of ways to heal and get back. Being out of line once doesn’t mean you are restricted all of your life. Understand how you molded into the never-ending series of traumas, getting the help needed, and talking out about your wounds, adds to making you better.
