Girl in Pieces

Girl in Pieces is a young adult novel by the American writer Kathleen Glasgow, published in 2016. It was her first book.

Charlotte Davis, known as Charlie, is seventeen when the novel begins, and she has lost her father, her best friend and any dependable support from her mother. Her way of coping is to hurt herself: the pain of cutting washes away what she cannot bear to think about, and every new scar leaves her a little harder and more removed from what is happening around her. The book follows her through the aftermath of a breakdown and into a period in which she is living with other young people who are in comparable difficulty, and it is equally concerned with the ordinary things that make recovery possible, among them friendship, somewhere to sleep and work she can do with her hands. Charlie's progress is slow and uneven, and nothing in the book fixes her all at once.

Glasgow writes about young people in crisis, and this novel handles self-harm and grief directly rather than from a distance.