Another Little Piece (Kate Karyus Quinn)

Another Little Piece is about the return of a girl named Annaliese to her hometown after disappearing a little under a year ago after trading her soul for the lust of her crush, Logan, the running back on her school football team. However, what she didn't realize is that she got cheated in more ways then one. As soon as she gives it up to Logan in the woods, she tells him he loves her and he pretends not to hear as he goes back to the party they're at. 

But it sucks for Annaliese because now she's lost everything and she's given up her soul for a boy who has what he wanted. Anna, the name of the one Annaliese gives her soul too, tells Annaliese she has to pay now. So Annaliese cuts Anna's heart out of her current body and then eats it, not realizing that in doing so she has given Anna control of her body. 

However, something goes wrong when the body Anna-is-currently-in's mother shows up and messes up the ceremony spiraling into a series of events that leads to Anna's memory loss and the beginning of the novel.

When Anna-as-Annaliese returns she runs into every love interest she's going to have in a record amount of time. Lucky for us though, it's never any contest who she has feelings for or any kind of love triangle. 

Eric/Franky is the creepy loser who manipulated Anna into her more than nine-lives years ago who insists that he loves her and she'll give in to moving onto the next body when the hunger for a new body takes over her. Apparently, the first time she switched bodies, it took over her and she killed her original family. 

There's Logan, whose role in the climax I should've seen coming but missed. I think that the lust may have evolved into something else because the first time Anna-as-Annaliese runs into him, he drunkingly reveals his guilt of taking her virginity and leaving her in the woods in front of the whole school turning her from a poor-victim into a home-wrecking whore.

Eventually, Logan becomes prey to Eric/Franky when he wants Annaliese's love and gives up his body and soul for it. 

And then there's Dex, the boy next door who's not as normal as you might think. Dex can see people's deaths and saw Annaliese's years ago, therefore recognizing that she is someone else not that that stops him from developing feelings for her.

I liked this book for a number of reasons.  I enjoyed how the author took a step away from the Twilight formula. I loved the romance factor. Anna and her love interest, Dex never say "I love you" to each other in the book. They never become creepily obsessed with each other or even get anywhere close to having those I-love-you feelings. And there's something about Dex that makes him so much more compelling then most YA love interests especially the paranormal versions. 

I also liked that it was a standalone novel instead of the author being greedy and trying to bank off of a series of books. And I also enjoyed that not every mystery of the book was wrapped up at the end. We didn't really learn about why the Physician was who he was and did what he did or about his sisters. But I'm glad we didn't because not everything had to be wrapped up at the end although I am curious but I feel like the explanation concocted wouldn't live up to the standards of the mystery.

This book was nothing like I thought it was going to be. But that is a good thing. I thought it was a realistic, suspenseful mystery and while it was two-thirds of those things, it also had supernatural tones too. And not the supernatural tones most books have. This book was actually dark and that was part of the reason I enjoyed it. Now-and-days most paranormal, supernatural books try to follow the success that Stephenie Meyer discovered with a Twilight-esque formula and everything but switch the new girl for the boy boy or the supernatural entity being the girl instead of the boy and blah-blah-blah. This novel was far from Twilight and I loved that about it.