Pieces of Us

January 23, 2012
Written from four alternating perspectives, Gelbwasser’s (Inconvenient) bleak second novel follows two pairs of teenage siblings who reunite each summer at their grandparents’ lakeside community in the Catskills. Star cheerleader Katie and her bookish younger sister, Julie, live in suburban New Jersey with their image-conscious mother who favors Katie, fueling Julie’s resentment. In Philadelphia, abusive Alex and his sensitive younger brother, Kyle, live with their mother, who has turned to stripping since their father committed suicide. When Katie is raped by her boyfriend and his friend, the boys threaten her with a video of the act. During the summer, the teens attempt to leave their problems, pasts, and even identities behind, but find it difficult to do so. This is a very grim portrayal of teen bullying, sexual abuse, and misogyny—Alex is unrelentingly cruel in his opinions of and treatment of women, and Katie suffers tremendously throughout. While some characterizations feel over-the-top (Alex, as well as Julie and Katie’s mother) or underdone (the teens’ grandparents are barely present), it’s an otherwise painfully believable of four teenagers struggling under intense social pressures. Ages 12–up. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

January 1, 2012
Two sets of deeply damaged siblings fall apart when their once-compartmentalized worlds of school and summer connect and crash. Alex and Kyle are brothers; Katie and Julie are sisters. Alex despises his mother, whom he holds responsible for his father's suicide and failing to protect him from a string of brutal boyfriends. He takes out his contempt for women on his loose-girl sex partners, frequently offering them to his intimidated younger brother Kyle, whom he abuses even though he thinks of himself as his brother's protector. The only girl Alex doesn't see as a slut is Katie. But Katie, who, when the book opens, is a queen-bee cheerleader with a star-athlete boyfriend, has too much to drink at a party and, semiconscious, has nonconsensual sex with her boyfriend and his teammate, an ugly secret the boys then use to torment and control her. Meanwhile, Katie's younger, less-pretty and pudgier sister, Julie, plagued by a mother who belittles her, believes that her sister stole the one boy who liked her. The four protagonists alternate the narration, three in the first person, one, oddly, in the second, providing multiple lenses on this car crash of a story, which finally ends on a welcome note of healing and hope. Suspenseful, disturbing and emotionally fraught, a strong novel for a strong stomach. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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March 1, 2012

Gr 10 Up-For a few weeks every summer, Julie, Katie, Alex, and Kyle are free of the demands of school and their lives back home when they meet at their grandparents' homes in the Catskills. But this year, events at home begin to interfere with their peaceful lives in the mountains. Alex is angry at his father for abandoning the family and his mother for ignoring him and Kyle. He acts out by having meaningless sex with a succession of girls and leaving them behind. Kyle stays quietly out of sight as much as he can. Katie is a popular cheerleader whose mother dotes on her while her sister, Julie, can do nothing right. But when a violent date rape is caught on tape and goes viral throughout the school, the grief and humiliation is more than Katie can handle. And when Alex finds out about the incident, his anger boils over into his relationship with her, and their idyllic summers are over. This bitterly dark, depressing drama has multiple interlocking story lines that all end unhappily, and the characters, especially Alex, don't change much by the end of the book. The narrative alternates among the four teens, which gives interesting perspectives to the story, but can be confusing. The plotline of too much alcohol mixed into a party atmosphere results in a great cautionary tale but the extremely descriptive sexual violence and repetitious use of raw language make this one suitable for only the most mature readers.-Diana Pierce, Leander High School, TX

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