Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

This compelling and gut-wrenchingly honest memoir reads like a car wreck that's impossible to turn away from as Kuehnert recounts how she survived an extremely destructive adolescence. As a child in Oak Park, Illinois, Kuehnert idolized book characters Laura Ingalls Wilder and Ramona Quimby and yearned to write of experiences like theirs but didn’t think her life was interesting enough. That would change by the time she was in high school. Kuehnert says she started cutting in seventh grade: “I thought [it] did a lot less damage than people.” She created her own poetry zine in high school, and pages ripped from those zines and her diaries illustrate this mesmerizing memoir. Telling chapter headings (“Boys Will Be . . .”, “Girls Will Be. . .”, “True Bad Romance”) describe the female friends she made (and fought with) and the toxic, sexually abusive relationships she endured in high school with Greg and, later in college, with narcissistic Simon, 24, who started dating her when she was only 17. She developed an eating disorder while dating Greg and survived substance abuse with Simon, sometimes explicitly depicted relationships she likens to Sid and Nancy and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Exposito's line illustrations add weight to Kuehnert’s harrowing but ultimately triumphant and hopeful life story for mature teen readers.

Publishers Weekly
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Via a strong, captivating voice, Kuehnert spins a kaleidoscopic tale of girlhood, starting when she moves to Oak Park, Ill., at age eight and leading up to her preoccupation with the 1990s riot grrrl movement and beyond. Her tumultuous and traumatic first relationship anchors the narrative, and vignettes depicting this abusive period, instances of self-harm, substance reliance, and depression juxtapose humorous stories of attempting to summon George Washington via Ouija board, falling in love with Nirvana, calling people’s pagers, and reading Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat. Through oscillating streams of consciousness and journal-esque recounting of events, Kuehnert crafts an arc of her formative years, replete with a curation of comics, diary entries, mixtape lists, photographs, teen poetry, and zine pages in a compulsively readable mixed-media collage of grungy aesthetics and 90s paraphernalia. The result is a memoir with sharp teeth and a soft underbelly, the product mirroring the author’s catharsis in creating art: “As broken and aching as I may have felt inside while I wrote and cut and pasted and photocopied and assembled, the sliver of a belief surfaced that I had the power to make myself whole again.” Ages 14–up. (Mar.) ■

School Library Journal
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Gr 9 Up—Novelist Kuehnert is ready to "tell real stories…about my life." The book's cover displays all the labels she's tried on: "weirdo, sad, numb, damaged," but also "artist, smart, strong." Moving upward are "grrrl, resilient," and—as yet unfinished—"survivor." Kuehnert "always wanted to tell stories." Third-grade Stephanie began mentally narrating her life, although doubted she was doing anything "interesting, book-worthy." Eighth-grade Stephanie wrote poetry—and discovered safety pins and razor blades. Her "angry, bloody girlhood" skirted too close to a fatal adolescence (lasting until "more like twenty-four than eighteen") of self-harm, addictions, toxic relationships. No one else but Kuehnert—pronounced Key-nert, as only she can so definitively assert—could have narrated the brutally raw, soul-decimating experiences with the transformative triumphs that buttress her to be "one of the girls who lived." VERDICT In her own soul-baring voice, Kuehnert reassembles the Pieces of a Girl into wholeness.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

In this zinelike memoir, a YA author shares the pain of her fraught growing-up years in the 1990s. Kuehnert, a white woman from a middle-class family, knew from age 7 that she wanted to be a writer. She struggled with depression and by eighth grade was self-harming. In ninth grade, eager to launch her “Real Teenage Life,” she started hanging out at Scoville Park in her hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Scoville had an outsized influence on her life: It was there that she started using alcohol and drugs and started dating a boy who raped and abused her. That brief relationship caused tremendous pain and led to disordered eating, addiction, and another unhealthy relationship. “This is the truth about rock bottom: It doesn’t exist. You will keep falling until you die unless you choose to climb.” Kuehnert’s friendships with girls were intense, complicated, and sometimes cruel. Laced throughout the book are homages to Nirvana, Courtney Love, and other grunge and punk musicians. Kuehnert’s story unfolds through essays, with the text broken up by photos, cartoons, fragments of her poetry, journal entries, and images of her zines. The book’s appeal rests in the author’s engaging and honest voice, the mentions of ’90s cultural touchstones (such as the Riot Grrrls), and the chronicling of her path to survival. The latter part feels rushed, but the bulk of the work illuminates her youthful thought processes in ways that will be helpful to many readers. A raw, deep dive into one young woman’s struggle for wholeness. (Memoir. 14-18) Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.