REVIEW: Another Little Piece by Kate Karyus Quinn

Another Little Piece by Kate Karyus Quinn
Publisher: HarperTeen
Publication Date: June 11, 2013
Source: Edelweiss via publisher*
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Get it: Amazon | B&N

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.

My Review

I’m not really sure how I actually feel about this book, but if you were going ask me to describe it, I’d called in these tamer words, screwed the heck up. And I mean screwed up in a semi-what the bleep is going on good way. 



So the main character and narrator of this creeptastic novel is supposed to be Annaliese, but well.. it’s not. What the heck do I mean? I don’t want to spoil the story, so just trust me when I say that though almost everyone calls the MC Annaliese, she is not Annaliese, but Anna. Like how I don’t really know how to describe this book, I don’t really know what to make of Anna. I felt bad for her that’s for sure because she was in such a crappy situation, but I was also disgusted as well. It was hard to sympathize with Anna because of the things she had done, but there was redemption for her in this book. Did I like Anna? Hell, I don’t even know myself. When she cared for the parents and when she loved Dex, sure. It was hard because the past and the present collided a lot in the book and had my emotions going haywire. Either way, Anna was a very interesting character. 


Now the plot of this book either renders me speechless or confuses the (insert the four letter inappropriate word of choice here) out of me. Honestly, I didn’t know half of the stuff that was going on when it came to Anna’s predicament. Her memories would come and go and though they were supposed to be insightful, they left me disoriented. I think my mind always had to race to catch up. But I think by the end, I understood the basic-ness of what was going on and what happened to Annaliese and what happened to Anna.



The problem I had was this: WHY? I wanted to know what the purpose was for what Anna and Franky were doing along with the Physician’s role in all of it. However this never really gets answered. Or at least, I don’t think so. I will say that Another Little Piece was in fact, creepy as hell and very very dark. Something sinister and gruesome was going on and my favorite parts were probably those graphic scenes because they gave me chills for sure. Though I was confused, I thought the driving force of this book was finding out what in the world happened to Anna and trust me, this all gets answered. 

My favorite part of this book by far is (how could you not know) Dex. I adored the little romance Dex and Anna had. It was unusual, yet kind and sweet. I loved Dex because he talked a lot, was told by his mother that he was a late bloomer, who hung on to a razor for someone without asking questions, who recorded screams and replayed them, who rocked out to Bohemian Rhapsody, and described his first kiss to a like letter written on the back of an envelope. He was the boy next door, literally and figuratively. The boy who wanted to help even when he could barely help himself. He was the boy who dealt with his problems and issues in a positive way and said that there was always a choice to make. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor, he didn’t rescue a damsel in distress, he wasn’t a bad boy, or even the hottest guy around. He was weird, maybe even shy, but he had such a big heart, I cannot be blamed for falling head over heels for this guy. 



While I did like Another Little Piece, I thought it lacked the compulsion to draw me in. I was never really invested into the story, but I wasn’t disappointed by it either. Nonetheless, this book was just sick and unique and I mean that in a positive way. 



*Thanks to HarperTeen for sending a copy for review purposes

I was not compensated for my opinion