Another Little Piece

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.

Amazon.com Review

Another Little Piece In this Amazon exclusive list, author Kate Karyus Quinn shares the top three writing lessons she’s taken away from her enthusiastic TV-watching.1. VILLAINS ARE HEROES. HEROES ARE VILLAINS. Xander: [...] Let me tell you something. When it's dark and I'm all alone, and I'm scared or freaked out or whatever, I always think “What would Buffy do?” You're my hero. OK, sometimes when it's dark and I'm all alone, I think “What is Buffy wearing?” From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 4, “The Freshman” Of course, I am going to kick things off with Buffy. Buffy is the chosen one—not just on the show, but in my own personal TV hall of fame. Buffy is the first show that I fell for so hard that in between seasons I went online looking for spoilers, just to get my fix. There are so many takeaways from the seven magical seasons that Buffy was on the air. And some jaw-droppingly killer episodes (“Hush”, “The Body”, “Once More with Feeling”) that ought to be sealed in carbonite so they’ll be preserved forever for future generations. However, the most important thing I took from Buffy was this two-sided question: what makes a hero/what makes a villain? It starts with Angel, the vampire cursed with a soul that Buffy falls in love with. It seems like these two crazy kids might be able to make things work—until Buffy sleeping with Angel turns him evil again. Then she has to kill him, because she’s the slayer and that’s kind of her job. But Angel isn’t the only character who tangles with the dark side. Faith, Spike (yet another vampire that Buffy becomes romantically involved with), and even Buffy’s best friend Willow all find that sometimes it’s good to be bad. And this entire good/bad dichotomy leads me to the next lesson... 2. WHO AM I ANYWAY? Number Six: Are you alive?Military Liaison: Yes.Number Six: Prove it.From Battlestar Galactica, Miniseries, Part I (first spoken lines of series) What does it mean to be human? BSG asked a lot of BIG QUESTIONS over the course of four brilliant seasons, but this was the one it kept returning to over and over again. For the uninitiated, here’s the super quick recap: Humans made robots called Cylons. The Cylons and humans started fighting. The Cylons created new Cylons that looked EXACTLY like humans, and then blew up an entire planet, leaving humanity on the brink of extinction. The Battlestar Galactica holds all that’s left of humanity, but are there Cylons hidden among them? How do you decide who is human? And when you find a hidden Cylon you thought was your friend, lover, or superior officer—how do you respond?I must also mention the secondary question of fate, which plays a large part in the BSG mythology. “All of this has happened before, and will happen again,” gets repeated throughout the series and is the note it ends on. For most of the series it was a riddle that made you ask, “What the heck are they talking about?”And this leads me to my last lesson... 3. WHAT THE WHAT??!?! Jack: I'll do it. This is why I'm here. This is... this is what I'm supposed to do.Jacob: Is that a question, Jack?Jack: ...No.Jacob: Good, then it's time..From Lost, Season 6, “What They Died For”I didn’t always like Lost. In fact, by the end of the series, I was pretty tired of it. And yet... I couldn’t stop watching. I had to know what it was all about. Like Buffy, this show was interested in what made a hero or villain, and it wasn’t afraid of switching characters from one column into the other. Like BSG, it also asked questions about destiny. But what set Lost apart was the way it chose to tell its story—by making it a puzzle with Sudoku-like levels of addictiveness (except the numbers here always added up to: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42). The mysteries of the islands: the numbers, the others, the hatch, the smoke monster, Jacob, and MORE were just the beginning of the question-making. Those I could have walked away from. But the show took the main characters and made each one of them a puzzle too. With a fade to white and a distinctive whooshing sound effect, we were given different pieces of their pre-island (and later post-island) lives. The flashbacks weren’t always in chronological order either. You needed a wall-sized corkboard to keep track of all of the histories of multiple characters over six seasons of the show. This was not mindless television that you watched while flipping through a magazine. Even when the twists and character choices drove you crazy, Lost was never boring.So that’s a bit of what I’ve learned from TV—and I applied all of these lessons to Another Little Piece.

From School Library Journal

Gr 10 Up-Annaliese returns to her family in Buffalo after disappearing. She has complete amnesia, a terrible scar on her forehead, and brain damage. However, the teen seems no worse for it-until she finds herself craving human flesh. Little by little, memories begin to surface, but they are not hers. Rather, they belong to Anna, the being who has taken over Annaliese's body. Anna's memories are of living one short year in the bodies of many other teenage girls until it is time for the bloody ritual that allows her to transfer to yet another. The old body turns to dust as the new one is inhabited. Anna realizes that she is some sort of monster. She is determined to stop the horrifying cycle with the love and support of an outsider named Dex, who has his own dark secret. Her story is nicely written in short segments, each with a title, and independent poems are dispersed throughout. The author cleverly assists readers in mentally switching between the past and present as the story unfolds, while the poems allow them to get to know the real Annaliese. The mystery builds at a leisurely pace, giving plenty of time to plot and character development. The varied story elements also tie together neatly at the end. This supernatural romance will fit the bill for teens who like eerie mysteries tinged with grit and gore.-Mindy Whipple, West Jordan Library, UTα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From Booklist

Seventeen-year-old Annaliese was last seen running from the woods during a party, screaming and bloody, before vanishing in front of her classmates’ eyes. When she is found wandering far from her Buffalo home, she has no memory of the year she has been gone and no memory of being Annaliese. Her parents, her friends, and her longtime crush are all strangers to her—but if she is not Annaliese, who is she? Strange, violent memories—not just of being Annaliese, but of being other missing girls, too—coupled with periodic cannibalistic urges cement her fears that she may be a monster inside another girl’s skin. Quinn’s debut about the dark side of reincarnation mixes psychological mystery with the paranormal, slowly revealing hints of the violent cycle Annaliese is trapped within. Too many details are withheld for true satisfaction, and a bevy of side characters (a menacing figure called The Physician, a fellow skinwalker, a set of brujas, and a love interest who predicts people’s deaths) sometimes obfuscate the story. Nevertheless, this gory, suspenseful thriller will appeal to fans of eerie fiction. Grades 9-12. --Krista Hutley

yet one who’s not beyond redemption.”

“A gripping ride. Quinn skillfully occupies the mind of a young woman who turns out to be a monster

Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“Stunning in its raw emotion. A taut, terrifying supernatural thriller.”

From the Back Cover

A reckless wish taken from the darkest desires of the heart . . .A bloody razor engraved with the names of girls who turned to dust . . .An endless cycle that feeds off loneliness and craves destruction . . .Together, these pieces form a twisted puzzle that Annaliese Rose Gordon has to solve. Trapped in a body that isn't hers—with no memory of how she got there—she must unlock the secrets of her past in order to escape the horrors of her future.

About the Author

Kate Karyus Quinn is an avid reader and a menthol ChapStick addict. She has lived in California and Tennessee but recently made the move back to her hometown of Buffalo, New York, with her husband and two children in tow. She promised them wonderful people, amazing food, and weather that would . . . build character. She is also the author of Another Little Piece and (Don’t You) Forget About Me. You can visit Kate online at www.katekaryusquinn.com.

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