Pieces of You and Me by Erin Fletcher

Title: Pieces of You and Me

Author: Erin Fletcher

Publisher: Entangled Crush

Release Date: April 18, 2016

Source: ARC from Publisher

Buy the Book: Amazon / B&N / Indigo

Five years.

That’s how long I’ve been gone. Since I left my best friend—the girl I loved—behind.

Five seconds.

That’s how long it takes to realize I am completely, utterly, screwed. Because now that I’m back, my childhood crush has turned into so much more.

Rylee has changed. We both have. And now I’m drawn to her in a completely different way. To her smile. Her touch. To reliving old memories and making new ones. To the happiness she’s always given me that I haven’t felt since I left.

But her friends are hell-bent on keeping up apart. My dad is one drink away from destroying both of our lives, and maybe I am, too. It’s only a matter of time before I have to leave again, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I never get a choice.

The one choice I can make? Stay away from Rylee. Because if I don’t, I’ll break her heart—and mine—all over again.

With the weather finally warming up, it makes me want to read contemporary books even more than I normally do (which, let’s not kid ourselves, they’re pretty much all I want to read anyways). I just love contemporaries so much, I can’t help it. And the latest one I enjoyed? Erin Fletcher’s Pieces of You and Me.

Five years ago, Chase left town and didn’t keep in touch. Rylee was left behind and has spent the past five years wondering why Chase left and didn’t keep in touch. He was her best friend, her soul mate, and she never heard from her. But now he’s back and neither Rylee nor Chase knows what to do about it. Chase knows he should stay away from Rylee because he’ll just end up hurting her again, but he can’t resist her pull. Rylee wants answers about what happened to Chase in the last five years. She wants her best friend back, but she’s afraid of being left behind and getting hurt again. Before being together, Rylee and Chase are going to have to decide if they’re willing to take a chance one each other once again.

Hi, my name is Emilie and I love second chance romances in all their many forms. But I don’t think that’s really news to anybody at this point (if it is: Hi! You must be new here! Heads up, I love second chance romances. A lot). Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you more about Erin Fletcher’s Pieces of You and Me. YA second chance romances are always trickier than regular old second chance romances because there’s obviously less time that’s going to have passed between the first and the second chance. That’s just a byproduct of writing a story about 16- to 18-year-olds. But in Pieces of You and Me, Erin Fletcher made it work. And the ages of the characters made it an interesting kind of second chance. In so many ways, it felt like I was reading a story about Rylee and Chase getting a second chance at friendship. That’s because at their core, Rylee and Chase were best friends and that’s what allowed them to work so well romantically. And it’s what made me like their relationship even more.

I really enjoyed getting to read this story from both Rylee and Chase’s perspectives. It allowed me to better understand the way they were dealing with seeing each other again after five years with no communications. I understood their respective hesitations about starting something with each other, their fear of getting hurt again, and their desire to protect themselves and each other from that hurt. Sure, at times it led to be being a little frustrated with them because I just wanted them to be happy and together and they were not allowing themselves that for silly reasons (granted, it’s easy for me to say that as an outside observer to their relationship). My only wish where Rylee and Chase are concerned is that I could have seen more of them in the past, before Chase left town. The few glimpses of younger Rylee and Chase I got through their own memories made me think that I would have really enjoyed reading about them during their middle school years as well as their high school years. 

Erin Fletcher’s Pieces of You and Me was a fun contemporary story about a second chance at friendship and romance. I always love reading good contemporary stories and this is exactly what this one was.