Review: A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray

Summary

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.

My thoughts

What is it with YA novels about parallel worlds? I LOVE reading about parallel/alternate worlds but in YA, most of them seem to be just meh and I’m always looking for more and another one that blows my mind with its epicness but sometimes I think I should just stop.

Maybe I should have known better. Claudia Gray usually doesn’t write the kind of books I like to read, but both the topic of parallel worlds and the phenomenal cover made me want to read it anyway. And I feel kinda bad for only giving this two stars because I pretty much got what I feared I would get BUT I always hoped I would be wrong and get the awesome story I wish to get. So I still think there are people who will probably enjoy this, but I didn’t because of a lot of things:

• What I wanted to read about is a wild hunt through different worlds, but what I got is a romance. Not just any romance, but an annoying romance with two love interests and a girl who’s confused about her own feelings. At least at the end she knew who she wants to be with but until then she likes to change her mind about who she has feelings for and if that someone is to be trusted.
• Marguerite is a VERY selfish and naive character. I didn’t like her one bit and in certain situations I wanted to bash her over the head with my eReader.
  “Fear quivers in my belly, but I tell myself it was only once.” (Her,thinking about getting pregnant after having unprotected sex)
• The traveling to different realities is actually interesting and well done, but the way they travel makes some situations rather difficult and even ridiculous. Situations when Marguerite actually ruins her “twin’s” life by being selfish and refusing to use her brain before acting.
  “I stole that from her. Something sacred that ought to have been hers alone became mine forever”
  That part made me SO angry. It was SO wrong what she did.
• “the truth about her father’s death”: I knew what was really going on right from the start. All of it. Who was responsible, who was not, what happened and why it happened. This was supposed to be the interesting part that let’s me overlook this awful romance, but it didn’t.

The parallel world aspect in this story was definitely interesting, it came with new ideas on how it works and I loved the science around it. It was more than just having a device to do that. We get actual scientific explanations and even the question is raised if one should travel to different worlds or leave them alone. All this was a too small part of the story though and overshadowed by the annoying romance. I can imagine other people liking it, but for me, it didn’t work at all.