Two newly released profound and moving YA novels focus on the emotional struggles and intense pain that often face teens as they come of age during high school. After 17-year-old Charlie wakes up in a mental health facility for attempting suicide in Kathleen Glasgow’s debut novel Girl in Pieces, she slowly reveals her painful past and the broken relationships that drove her to self-harm. Told with brutal honesty and hopeful passion, Girl in Pieces follows Charlie as she bravely journeys toward self-acceptance and recovery. Even as she battles her inner demons and struggles to make good choices in her relationships and personal self-care, readers will empathize deeply with Charlie’s yearning for affection and connect with her raw emotion. Glasgow, a former cutter herself, writes with heartbreaking candor and beautiful prose to share an important story of resilience and teenage turmoil.
In international bestselling author Jennifer Niven’s newest novel, Holding up the Universe, an unlikely pair of misunderstood teenagers come together after a cruel high school prank lands them both in group counseling. Libby Strout, once dubbed “America’s Fattest Teen,” has recently returned to mainstream high school after years of homeschooling and mourning the death of her mother, who passed away when she was 11. Jack Masselin, a charismatic and creative popular student, holds a painful secret of his own in the form of prosopagnosia, or face blindness. As the two slowly reveal themselves to one another, told in alternating chapters, they share important lessons about self-acceptance, understanding and forgiveness.
Glasgow and Niven are both New York Times bestselling authors. They will appear together at Boswell Book Co. at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6.
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BOOK HAPPENING:
James Belflower and Matthew Klane
7 p.m., Friday, Oct. 7
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E. Locust St.
New York poets James Belflower and Matthew Klane will visit Milwaukee to read from their newest release Canyons, a poetic reimagining of Manifest Destiny and its often brutish and unforeseen consequences. Belflower is the author of three previous collections, including The Posture of Contour (2013). Klane, a co-editor at Film Forum Press and a professor at Russell Sage College, has a forthcoming e-book entitled My.
