Author: Claudia Gray
Published: October 7th, 2014
Publisher: Harper Teen
Genre: YA, Science-Fiction, Romance
Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their radical scientific achievements. Their most astonishing invention: the Firebird, which allows users to jump into parallel universes, some vastly altered from our own. But when Marguerite’s father is murdered, the killer—her parent’s handsome and enigmatic assistant Paul—escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.
Marguerite can’t let the man who destroyed her family go free, and she races after Paul through different universes, where their lives entangle in increasingly familiar ways. With each encounter she begins to question Paul’s guilt—and her own heart. Soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is more sinister than she ever could have imagined.
A Thousand Pieces of You explores a reality where we witness the countless other lives we might lead in an amazingly intricate multiverse, and ask whether, amid infinite possibilities, one love can endure.
First Line: My hand shakes as I brace myself against the brick wall.
Marguerite's genius physicist parents have just invented the Firebird, a revolutionary technology that allows a person to hop different universes. Before the family can celebrate, Marguerite's father is killed, and her parent's life work destroyed. The only suspect is the quiet lab assistant, Paul, that's been with Marguerite's family for a year. Spurred by grief and anger, Marguerite vows to avenge her father's death and goes on a wild goose chase through parallel universes with Theo, another lab assistant, in the hopes of catching her father's killer.
They use the Firebird to dimension hop. The Firebird is about the size of a locket, so it's easy to conceal, and it lets the wearer slide into other versions of themselves. So it's not like other stories about parallel universes where the characters have to actively avoid their alternate selves. Instead they become said person. Unfortunately, the wearer of the Firebird needs a "reminder" every now and again in case the bodysnatcher starts to forget who they really are.
A Thousand Pieces of You was two parts annoying romance, one part actual sci-fi plot. If you're under the impression that this is an epic thriller spread across several universes, STOP. I am here to tell you that that is not the case. This is a romance heavy novel masquerading as a sci-fi thriller. The cool dimension hopping is background compared to Marguerite's love life.
But let's start with Marguerite. She seemed interesting in the first chapter and I thought, "Hell yeah! We got a badass over here!" But no, Marguerite is the farthest thing from badass there is. She is whiny, reckless, immature, and very self-obsessed. She is the typical, "I have brown hair and brown eyes, that means I'm a plain jane. I'm also super skinny, without any curves at all, so no boy could ever like me, despite my multiple love interests."
She goes on the hunt for Paul based on. . . what exactly? I spent the first part of the book confused because I didn't understand why Paul was the number one suspect. He wrecked her parents lab, but instead of waiting for the police to investigate her fathers murder and fish his car out of the sea, Marguerite decides she's going to go after Paul to kill him.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Not to talk to him and get his side of the story or hand him over to the police, but to kill him. Because that's the next logical step in reasoning. And of course her buddy Theo is like, "Good thing the Firebirds have a function for killing!" Keep in mind that this all occurs less than twenty-four hours after her Dad died.
So Marguerite, so filled with bloodthirst, confronts Paul in the first universe they travel to, and immediately changes her mind once she sees how "sad" his eyes get when accused of her Dad's murder. Yep, once again, let's throw logic to the side and follow our heart! Of course Theo, the voice of reason, is like, "Yo dawg you can't just clear someone of innocence because they said they were innocent." But Marguerite just won't listen. That is of course, until she hops into the third universe and discovers that the Paul of that universe has once again betrayed her parents.
I'm going to step away from Marguerite's ludicrous logic and move on to the pseudo-science of this book. There is so much of it! I'm down for vague scientific explanations, but the one's in this book were so silly. Every time Marguerite or someone else would start explaining something, they would suddenly say, "But that's too hard so I'm not going to touch on that." No. You do not start to explain something and then just stop EVERY TIME.
There's this:
"The devices have to be made out of specific materials that move much more easily than other forms of matter; they have to anchor the consciousness of the traveler, which is apparently very difficult; and about a million other technical considerations I'd have to get umpteen physics degrees to even understand. Long story short: the devices are really hard to make."
Thank you for that lazy explanation. I'm sure the reader could have worked out for themselves that the Firebirds were hard to make.
I feel like if you're doing sci-fi, you either explain it or you don't. Either go all out with the science-y stuff, or just throw your hands up and say, "lol eff that I don't know how any of this crap works. Shut up and read."
The thing that bothered me most about the novel, however, was the romance. I did not expect it to be the main plot, and I honestly feel lied to by the marketing. Also, it was just plain bad.
Basically, Marguerite is the super special corner of a love square. There's Theo, the bad boy with a charming sense of humor, Paul, the quiet genius who sends Marguerite longing looks, and Other-Paul, who is also a quiet genius who sends Marguerite longing looks, but he's Russian.
When Marguerite is with Theo, she's all, "Ooh, he's the one! I can't let him get away." He's the alluring bad boy to her shy good girl.
When she travels to the Russian universe, she falls in love with Other-Paul, then decides that she must be in love with all Pauls in every universe. There's a brief mention of mathematical destiny, and Marguerite concludes that she'll always love Paul no matter the universe.
But despite this realization, when she finally meets up with Real-Paul, she switches to, "I don't think I can love you because you're different from Other-Paul." Even though she had just decided that all Pauls were created equal.
She briefly toys with the idea of Theo again before finally deciding that Paul is the one.
And that is the plot of the book. Not the epic sci-fi thriller we were promised, but a long drawn out romance, with vague thriller-y stuff in the background. There are hardly a thousand pieces. More like four, to be specific. Marguerite only travels to four universes, and one of them takes up half of the book, so that title was very misleading. There's also a subplot that involves Marguerite being super speshul, but that only occurs within the last fifty pages.
I had high hopes for this book, but it ended up failing on every level.
Verdict
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