A Thousand Pieces of You Book Review

 

    Riddle me this: Your parents are cutting-edge physicists that have just created a machine named the Firebird that lets one travel in between dimensions. (There are infinite dimensions in the Universe, your parents have discovered, one for every possible outcome of every single situation for every single person alive.) Your parents have an influx of grad students filtering in and out of their home from around the world. Presently, the two students are Theo and Paul, both of which are annoyingly good at physics and have both won your parent's approval and love. On the evening of the grand reveal of the Firebird, your father gets murdered, and the suspect is none other than Paul, your parent's quiet, shy star student. Paul has mysteriously and suspiciously vanished from--quite literally--the face of the Earth after erasing all your parents' research and work. What do you do? 

  

  Well, for Marguerite Caine, nothing other than steal the illicit prototype of the Firebird that Theo--your parent's other star student, who was always eclipsed in Paul's shadow--made and chase Paul across dimensions. From the damp streets of London to rich, Tsarist Russia, and even to a submarine in a post-apocalyptic Earth, Marguerite tails Paul and his secrets. In each dimension, she encounters a new Paul that makes her question her heart, loyalties, and reality; and in each dimension, she gets closer to the truth as to how her father was supposedly murdered and who she can trust. 

    Marguerite's mom, Sophia Kovalenka, spent her entire life theorizing that there was indeed more than one dimension and that it wasn't completely crazy to want to travel between those dimensions; that, given you have the right technology, you could seamlessly filter between the aforesaid alternate dimensions. To elaborate, there is one dimension for each outcome; anything that can happen does happen. Infinite possibilities equal infinite outcomes, as Theo oft mentions. Exempli gratia, say you wore a yellow shirt some day in third grade; in an alternate dimension, you would've rather worn a green shirt or a red shirt or an orange shirt or whatever color shirt. Imagine a situation that you experienced once upon a time -- like the weather on a certain day in May -- and then imagine every single thing that could've alternatively happened. Yup, there's a dimension where that does happen, where it rained rather than snowed, where the skies are green rather than blue, where Earth's rotation is 364 days rather than 365. There is a dimension for everything, every possibility, everywhere. When one travels between dimensions, they inhibit the body of their self in that dimension; their self in that dimension is still present in the traveler's body, per se, but they're not 100% conscious. Instead, the traveler is the one making the decisions and living that person's life... except it's the traveler's life too. More or less, they're the same people, except they're not. Their lives are completely different. Their souls are the same, as Marguerite notes early in the novel, but everything else changes. After all, it's a different dimension! 

    Suffice to say, it's a little crazy to follow a would-be murderer through dimensions where anything is possible, where the aforesaid murderer would be inhabiting the body of another him. But Marguerite and Theo do it; Theo explains that he created prototypes of the Firebird from old models that they can use to follow Paul, and so they pursue him into another world that contains another piece of themselves. At first, Marguerite and Theo just want to avenge Marguerite's dad, Henry. But as time goes on and Marguerite becomes more and more embroiled in the mystery of her dad's supposed death, she realizes that Paul simply couldn't have killed her father. Firstly, he didn't even know her dad was dead when she initially encountered him whilst her first time traveling dimensions. Encounter is a loose definition -- Paul and Theo ended up fighting, during which Marguerite and Paul hitched a ride in a subway, leaving Theo on the tracks to find his own way out -- but the meaning stays the same: Paul didn't kill Henry Caine. He couldn't have, Marguerite says, even though Theo tells her she's crazy. He's Paul. His parents neglected him and never paid attention to him, yet his genius was prevalent enough to land him a researcher's assistant job in Los Angeles. He wears clothes from second-hand stores because he can't afford anything else and won't accept anything from Marguerite's parents. He's clumsy, and not very emotionally intelligent, but all too sweet. He's the one who's always understood her, taken care of her, gotten her. How could he have killed her father? How could he have destroyed all the research, stolen her parent's prized Firebird, messed with her father's brakes so his car capsized in a river, and dashed into an entirely different dimension afterward? How could he have even considered it? 

    So Marguerite wanders through the dimensions, confused and tired and exhausted, her only motivation to avenge her father. To avenge her family. She's ever-so-bamboozled between Theo and Paul, two completely different guys who are poles--and dimensions--apart. She doesn't know what to do; she's barely aware of what the right thing to do is. But she keeps a calm head and reminds herself that whoever her father's killer might be, they're going to pay. She perseveres through, and all along, Triad lurks in the background. Triad, that funded her parent's research. Triad, led by the all too charming Mark Zuckerburg-esque Wyatt Conley. Triad, that planted a strange contraption in her family's parlor to explode and bug the room. And suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, it's clear as day -- it was Triad. 

    

     At its core, A Thousand Pieces of You is a story of love and the art of trusting and being trusted. After her dad died--ahem, ahem--Marguerite wasn't sure who to trust, but if anything, the entire conflict that ensued sharpened her sense of right, wrong, true, false, and trustworthy. In each dimension, Marguerite met a new version of Paul; a soldier, a wannabe university professor, a submarine pilot, but always Paul. Her Paul. Paul stayed the same, and so did she. When you travel dimensions, your surroundings may change, but you don't change. Your soul stays the same; your essence, your ethos, the true core of who you are, remains intact. And so Paul and Marguerite hopelessly fall for each other, trusting that the thousand pieces of them scattered across a thousand dimensions will be enough to harbor their love home. 

    Quite honestly, A Thousand Pieces of You is a whirlwind of a novel. I started the novel in present-day California; woven in the pages, I traveled to London, Russia, Silicon Valley, and everything in between. A Thousand Pieces of You is exhilarating, yes, but it's also stunning. Frankly, this book had me on the edge of my seat more often than I would like to admit, and the writing is an outrageously, dangerously, borderline-illegal type of amazing. And did I mention how funny it is? Somehow, in between the ridiculously roller-coaster-like plot twists and physics jargon of A Thousand Pieces of You, Claudia Gray incorporated an element that will never change across any dimension: humor. 

   So, in conclusion, A Thousand Pieces of You is the perfect book for anyone who wants to get swept away in a melting pot of destiny, fate, and possibility. I first read this book in December, and albeit that was a super long time ago, I still remember my amazement. This book didn't just bring mystery, romance, and thrill to the table; it had me at the edge of my seat, rooting for Paul, Marguerite, and Theo, and wondering how Claudia Gray could find a plausible way out of the hilarious mess that composes A Thousand Pieces of You. I say this a lot, but I seriously LOVED this book. Whenever I'm feeling a little bit unsure about what the future might hold, I'm going to read it, because nothing puts life in perspective like the notion that you basically have thousands of backup chances across the universe. If you mess up in this one, just obtain a Firebird and hop to the next dimension over; people won't remember your name, much less the not-so-admirable grade you got on some random test in freshman year. So, in conclusion: READ A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU! It's has surpassed all books I've read this year onto the throne of being my favorite, and I'm a thousand percent sure--pun intended--that you'll beyond adore it too.

- Simrah