A review by bookdragonheart
Pieces of a Life by Jewel E. Ann
5.0
4.5 stars! What an interesting, and fascinating story! Childhood best friends, both secretly wanting more, but he’s essentially warned off by her father, making any possible relationship between them beyond friend forbidden. But it’s not just that aspect that makes their relationship so interesting. Their dynamic is just…..for lack of a better word, odd. And I don’t mean this in a bad way, like at all. Josie is such an intriguing character. She’s very logical, blunt, speaks her mind, almost to a fault, brilliant, and very socially awkward. I would even put her character near autistic in mannerisms and behaviors. She’s also very fascinated with death, and completely unfazed and unendingly curious by all things related to it. He’s enamored by her nearly from day one, even if she’s not of the same mind with him.
Colton and Josie become fast friends when he moves to town when they were kids, a meet cute that is adorable, and morphs relatively quickly from enemies to best friends. They go through their high school years, dating other people, sabotaging each other’s relationships in various ways - both purposely and inadvertently, until right before graduation, which brings on a culmination of events that tears them apart, devastating Josie, and forever making him the bad guy in her story. Seventeen years later, when their jobs bring them into each other’s paths, he sees it as a sign of their destiny to be together, while she’s still deeply, desperately heartbroken and angry with how they left things in high school.
While Colton works to regain Josie’s affection, and she fights him tooth an nail, they are thrust together over and over again for work, making it harder for Josie to avoid what Colton believes is inevitable. Then a highly traumatic event flips their lives over, and suddenly Josie finds herself dreaming about and obsessed over a serial murder case from over a century prior. As more and more about their history comes to light, their own personal demons coming to the surface, Josie and Colton find themselves more and more drawn together, all while an unexpected darkness works to pull them apart again. The twist at the end has me reeling, and really excited to see where the second half of this duet is going to take us - I know it’s going to be an absolutely engrossing story!
Colton and Josie become fast friends when he moves to town when they were kids, a meet cute that is adorable, and morphs relatively quickly from enemies to best friends. They go through their high school years, dating other people, sabotaging each other’s relationships in various ways - both purposely and inadvertently, until right before graduation, which brings on a culmination of events that tears them apart, devastating Josie, and forever making him the bad guy in her story. Seventeen years later, when their jobs bring them into each other’s paths, he sees it as a sign of their destiny to be together, while she’s still deeply, desperately heartbroken and angry with how they left things in high school.
While Colton works to regain Josie’s affection, and she fights him tooth an nail, they are thrust together over and over again for work, making it harder for Josie to avoid what Colton believes is inevitable. Then a highly traumatic event flips their lives over, and suddenly Josie finds herself dreaming about and obsessed over a serial murder case from over a century prior. As more and more about their history comes to light, their own personal demons coming to the surface, Josie and Colton find themselves more and more drawn together, all while an unexpected darkness works to pull them apart again. The twist at the end has me reeling, and really excited to see where the second half of this duet is going to take us - I know it’s going to be an absolutely engrossing story!