Skip to main content

Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter, a book review

Karin Slaughter’s 2018 novel Pieces of Her introduces characters worthy of being thrown aside, their charms a "trolley car off the tracks." A mother offering slightly backhanded compliments to a daughter who she doesn't know or understand. A daughter who has failed at every corner of life – especially independence, so much so that her sixty-three thousand dollar student loan, with its accompany $800 a month payment (for a degree she never finished), keeps her holed up in her mother's, gray decor, garage apartment, even though her father had offered to refinance the debt, only requiring the needed documents by his artificially imposed deadline – which she, of course, failed to meet.

Enter a teenager in black, his failed relationship his focus, a gun, six bullets, a knife and a minute sixteen seconds of mayhem spins the world of the daughter into unknown orbit. Beyond the borders of "mother" she knows little about the mother, or her capacity to kill someone.

The novel races through twists and turns, wealthy families with so much hate they turn on their patriarch, families the wealthy have take advantage of to the point of no return – killing each other killing the  patriarch. Someone threatening the mom, turning the daughter into a killer.

Edge of your seat plot twists keep the reader on the tracks to the end, but the characters, the bad guys and the good, are infused with odious character traits, and are not people you'd want to spend time with, except maybe Mike Falcone, the U.S. Marshall.

Source: Library Loan, discovered book through online article about female authors.






Purchase through our affiliate link, and referral fees donated to Woman of Wonder, a college scholarship fund for women.



Print Length: 476 pages

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How I got here and why it matters by Carol Doane

When I learned to write complete sentences I had one goal, to write a book. Somewhere in the youthful march through grade school, in some secret place long forgotten, is the book I started. I was seven-years old. I wrote prose, neatly in pencil, on blue lined notebook paper and added tiny illustrations at the top of my chapters. I drew my brother's birthday, bunny cake that celebrated his arrival at the terrible twos with frosting smeared onto his nose by my mother before she took his picture — with a film camera. I wrote about my uncle's visit from the distant country of Texas. I wrote about the way the world hurt and how small I felt. As I raced through school and ploughed down the writing path, I wrote stories and essays that high school teachers returned, scratched with red grammar corrections and tantalizing notes, such as, "This would make a good book." When I graduated college, my reward was to take a break, stop writing, and read what I wanted to

Review: Everything I never told you by Celeste Ng

“Everything here reminds her of what Lydia could have been.”   Lydia, a high school student has died and her mother drifts into her room to experience the smells and sensations of the girl who used to inhabit the space. Across town, Lydia’s father has dropped into another woman’s bed and sleeps tranquilly. Nothing in life has happened as it should. Love gets lost in withheld touches and unspoken thoughts. Parents’ expectations are driven into successive generations and serve as baggage rather than inspiration. Words hurt: “ this,”  referring to Lydia’s parent’s marriage, “isn’t right.” Words are avoided: mixed, interracial, mismatched. Words that could reassure lay stagnant and not vocalized. Words are smithed to cope: “disappeared, fell in the lake, drowned.” The family’s search to understand the daughter who died, their search for a killer to pin their grief on, the destruction of trust, and the slow melting away of relationships show a family on the brink. The sprint to finish this

Review: Bride of the Sea by Eman Quotah

“And the word  divorce  is whispering in his ear, a secret no when else knows.” Muneer, a 23-year-old journalism student from Saudi Arabia attending university in the United States, is considering divorcing his 19-year-old wife, also from Saudi Arabia, who is pregnant and about to give birth. He has this thought when she is shoveling snow without a jacket, scarf, or gloves. She seems to like the cold. Before the baby is born, she strips down to her underwear and walks into a lake in winter. Is this a suicide attempt? It’s hard to grasp that concept –a young woman so unhappy she walks into a lake pregnant, a couple who doesn’t share, has no team goal, with divorce thoughts shortly before their child is born. The couple divorces. The wife, Saeedah, or Sadie as she is later known, flees with their daughter and spends the next seventeen years hiding from Muneer, his family, and her family. How is this life of hiding, that Sadie has taken her daughter Hannah on, different from a culture th