Another Little Piece Review

TITLE Another Little Piece
AUTHOR Kate Karyus Quinn
PUBLICATION June 11th 2013 by HarperTeen
READ May 24 to 26, 2013
SOURCE From the publisher for review

The spine-tingling horror of Stephen King meets an eerie mystery worthy of Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars series in Kate Karyus Quinn's haunting debut.

On a cool autumn night, Annaliese Rose Gordon stumbled out of the woods and into a high school party. She was screaming. Drenched in blood. Then she vanished.

A year later, Annaliese is found wandering down a road hundreds of miles away. She doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know how she got there. She only knows one thing: She is not the real Annaliese Rose Gordon.

Now Annaliese is haunted by strange visions and broken memories. Memories of a reckless, desperate wish . . . a bloody razor . . . and the faces of other girls who disappeared. Piece by piece, Annaliese's fractured memories come together to reveal a violent, endless cycle that she will never escape—unless she can unlock the twisted secrets of her past.

This was the perfect kind of mind fuck book in my opinion. I spent much of the novel feeling like I was looking at everything through a haze, only getting a blurry picture of what was actually going on and upon finishing I was still left with quite a few questions. But I felt like that was OK here. Normally the questions would bother me but I think it was perfect for the mysterious tone of the story and I was supremely happy with the details that we did get.

Annaliese had been missing for nearly 1 year and she randomly comes back looking beat up and wearing a garbage bag to protect her from the rain. She has no recollection of where she was in the last year and also no memory of her life before she went missing. The detached feeling that anyone in her situation would have felt was conveyed very well. When she thought of her mom and dad she referred to them as “the mom” and “the dad” and of course collectively as “the parents.” I think that these constant reminders of how out of place she was feeling were perfect for the story. We are thrown into this world right as Annaliese is coming back and it sets a very ominous, mysterious tone that is maintained expertly throughout. As I mentioned before we do get details about exactly what sinister behavior caused Annaliese to go missing but we definitely don’t get the whole picture. I enjoyed peeling back the layers slowly and I appreciated how it took a lot of reading between the lines. This isn’t a story where everything is laid out plain and simple, you have to pay attention and pick up the littlest of details when you can.

Annaliese was definitely a girl who changed immensely throughout the novel. She started out as very lost and closed off, but her persistence in trying to figure out what happened to her and where she was really brought her out. She became someone who was very fierce and someone who would elicit fear out of people. I can’t say that I connected with her because her character was not a normal character in any way, but I did love the oddity that she was. I found myself devouring her words and loving the flashbacks we got to her of before. She does have a love interest here in her neighbor Dex. I really liked him! Quickly we see that not everyone is as they seem in the story and digging through his story was, at times, just as enthralling as finding out what happened to Annaliese.

The story is unfolded in a really neat way. We have our chapters and we also have what I would call sub-chapters. The time of the story changes very swiftly at times and we just get a small heading and are taken into the past. At first I did find this a little jarring but as I got into it I had no trouble quickly adjusting and finding out exactly who and when I was reading about. I think this was a great way to tell the story and feel that it really added to the ominous tone that I mentioned. It’s almost as if we get thrown from the present to the past just as Annaliese is thrust there in her sudden flashbacks.

I’m going to cut myself off there because I really don’t want to ruin this one for any potential readers. If I could give you any advice in closing it would be to not read reviews for this one. I scanned through the reviews on Goodreads and quickly found at least 5 that I consider extremely spoilery and that I think would ruin the reading experience. This isn’t a story that you want to know anything about, you want the past to be a blank slate, just as it is for Annaleise for much of the novel. I highly recommend this one and I definitely think that Kate Karyus Quinn is an up and coming author to watch. I will be waiting on her next novel with bated breath because I want the same chills and tingles in my life that this novel gave me.