“She had always believed—vehemently, with great conviction—that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.”

One sunny Saturday afternoon, Andrea Oliver’s life suddenly and irrevocably changed. In the course of mere seconds, she is forced to question everything she thought she knew about her mother Laura. Laura’s reaction to an unthinkable, but tragically all-too-common, act of violence leaves everyone — from Andy and her dad to the Belle Isle police officers assigned to the case — stunned. Who is really is Laura? Because she is very, VERY clearly not who Andy always thought she was. So, in true dazed daughter fashion, Andy sets out to find the truth. From Georgia to Austin to the outskirts of Chicago, Andy fights to learn the truth that can ultimately save her and her mother’s lives.

I’ve read nearly all of Karin Slaughter’s books and while Pieces of Her was a quick read, it wasn’t the best. I’ll just come out and say it: Andy was moderately annoying. Like… I understand that she has to be stubborn to move the story along and all, but it really is frustrating that she literally does nothing that anyone asks and everything that she’s asked to not do. Her detective playing and incredible indecision may or may not end up getting people killed and that’s just not the kind of main character that I really empathize with. But I DID enjoy the dual-story component of the book. The narrative bounces back and forth between the current Andy-led shenanigans and what is essentially the origin story of Andy’s mom. In the end, the two storylines kind of balanced each other out, so it wasn’t a total wash.

My Favorite Scene: Really… I got nothing. Sorry. But the scene that sticks out the most in my memory is a great example of how… unstable?… Andy is. She is on the run, listening but not listening to her mother’s advice to get out of dodge and don’t stop until you get there. So what does she do? She stops at a roadside motel. Okay, fine. She got tired. But THEN she goes to the bar across the street. And proceeds to recognize one of the patrons at the bar as someone that she thinks might or might not be stalking her and/or her mother. Red flag, no? No. She proceeds to come on reallll strong to this man, so much so that he has to remove her from his nether region. And then she goes back to her hotel room and proceeds to be so nervous of this guy that she can’t function. It makes no sense. But neither did she, so.

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