Review: A Thousand Pieces of You

Title: A Thousand Pieces of You
Author: Claudia Gray
Series: Firebird
Volume: 1
Genre: Science fiction, fantasy, romance
Goodreads

A Quick Introduction: Marguerite Caine has just lost her father and his killer got away... to another dimension. Marguerite's parents were a team of brilliant physicists and inventors, and together they created the Firebird, a device that allows a person to transport their consciousness from one version of themselves to another, in another dimension. Grieving her father and desperate to get some justice, Marguerite takes a prototype Firebird and follows the last person she would have expected to hurt her father, her parent's assistant Paul into another dimension.

Out of Ten: 7/10

Review at a Glance: This novel has an interesting premise, and, though it ended up being carried more by plot than character for me, it was enjoyable nonetheless.

Review: Overall, I enjoyed this one, it was quite engaging, though there were some things that pulled me out of the story. (Also, look at the cover. It's lovely.)

I enjoyed the science fiction component of the story- I don't know too much about multi-dimensional theories, and, though the idea of the Firebird is likely far-fetched in physics terms, it was a fun "what-if," which is really a main component of sci-fi. The dimension-jumping was interesting, and I would like to know more about that at some point. It was described well enough that the idea worked within the world Claudia Gray introduced.

The characters were fairly engaging, but not ones I really connected to. There was enough going on plot-wise, that this was less of a problem than if the novel had been entirely dependent on being character driven, though it reduce how invested I was in the story and its outcomes.

The romance... was convoluted. Part of it, for me, was that my reaction was basically, "Wait-what-suddenly-romance?" Possibly because I don't really buy that you can be the same person when your entire world is different, because, you know, nature vs. nurture, the environment a person is raised in dramatically alters them- their outlook, many aspects of their personality... So to me, when Marguerite was in alternate-dimension Russia, it was as if she took very little time and very few encounters to be utterly, completely in love with someone she had just met. So I essentially understood the idea of it, but it didn't really work for me.

There are a lot of different worlds introduced, and were generally pretty well-formed, though more more background for how each dimension had diverged from the one Marguerite calls home would have been interesting. This is the first book in a series, and I'm looking forward to exploring more of this world.