Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their groundbreaking achievements. Their most astonishing invention, called the Firebird, allows users to jump into multiple universes—and promises to revolutionize science forever. But then Marguerite’s father is murdered, and the killer—her parent’s handsome, enigmatic assistant Paul— escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him.
Marguerite refuses to let the man who destroyed her family go free. So she races after Paul through different universes, always leaping into another version of herself. But she also meets alternate versions of the people she knows—including Paul, whose life entangles with hers in increasingly familiar ways. Before long she begins to question Paul’s guilt—as well as her own heart. And soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is far more sinister than she expected.
First line: “My hand shakes as I brace myself against the brick wall.”
Title: A Thousand Pieces of You
Author: Claudia Gray
Series: Firebird (#1)
My Edition: A paperback from HarperTeen, published in 2014 with 360 pages.
Age: Young Adult (16+)
Genres: Young Adult, Science Fiction, Romance
WHY THIS BOOK
I saw the cover of this book and I just needed it right away. I had it on my tbr for a while, before my friend Helene bought it to me for christmas – and I finally got to read it now, in august.
PLOT
I first started the book a couple of days ago, and I was super-excited. The plot sounds and is incredible. I felt like it was so different and so cool, and I just needed this to be a good book. After reading the first couple of pages I was hooked on the universe and the plot and that kept going for the entire book. I liked the plot so so so much, but there were so many other factors in this book that just never got to me.
I don’t want to spoil the book, but as you already know, Marguerite travels between dimensions, and she visits different versions of her world, and she stays in one dimension longer than the others, and that exact dimension was the coolest, but also the most far fetched one. I felt like it was just so unrealistic that she was the person she was in this dimension, and I couldn’t let go of that.
The plot felt so rushed, I wish the author used more time to explore these dimensions, but she didn’t. We visit about four dimensions throughout the book in 360 pages, and it didn’t feel like I could grasp the whole world Marguerite was visiting. It felt like bits and pieces of everything and for me, that wasn’t enough.
WRITING
The writing is okay in this book. I’m not going to use my time telling you guys that she was a bad writer, because she wasn’t. But the thing about the writing is that it never caught me. I like to think as Maggie Stiefvater as the “perfect” storyteller in my eyes, because she can describe anything and make it sound so beautiful or so ugly. Here I felt like I was reading a summary of the things in Marguerite’s immediate surroundings, and that was it. It felt lacking and so obvious. I was never surprised by her writing?
CHARACTERS
This was the part that really annoyed me, and probably made me feel less of the book than it is. There are a lot of different characters, but we mostly have something to do with Marguerite, Theo and Paul. These are like the main characters in this book and, this is seriously a first, I could not connect with ONE character. Not even the sidekicks.
Marguerite to me felt like she was a teenager who had the emotional range of a stone. I mean, come on, her father dies in the beginning of the book and it takes her not 24 hours to go off into a different dimension to hunt down who killed her father, leaving her mother and her sister without any note that she’s left. She barely gets intimate with Theo after she suddenly realizes that she likes him a lot, but then a couple of days later she’s completely forgot about him and is in the arms of another man. She does all these stupid things when she’s in the other Marguerite’s bodies in the different dimensions, completely fucking her over – and then she still doesn’t feel bad about that at all. She’s incredibly selfish, and then in the ending of the book she just decides to save herself because everyone else doesn’t matter. She pissed me off so much, and I ended up seriously hating her.
Theo felt like the “safe” choice for Marguerite. He was handsome, kind of a bad boy, but hey, who doesn’t like them? And he likes her a lot, and he shows her that. He tries his best to take care of her, and all though there’s this big revelation in the ending regarding Theo, I felt like he was the character I was closest to liking
Paul just seemed seriously off and weird from the beginning. Not only did he do a lot of weird things, and he “couldn’t” explain why he did them. I couldn’t like him one bit, and all though one of the versions of him was pleasant enough, it wasn’t what I needed to feel like he was a likable character. I just couldn’t.
THE ENDING
The whole reason the ending was really bad was because I could seriously not see where this was going. I wish this “series” was a one-book-only. It didn’t give any suspense to the next book, only smaller things and no… I just bah.
ALL OVER
I couldn’t like the book. I couldn’t like the characters. This was a major let down for me because I felt like the plot had so much potential. I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone, but I guess that for me, since I’ve read some incredible books with incredible characters, this just didn’t cut it for me.
GOODREADS UPDATES
Page 34 / 9% “Hmm, not sure if this is really cool or really weird?”
Page 59 / 16% “Haha it’s getting hot and steamy here”
Page 116 / 32% “Still not sure about this book :/”
Page 181 / 50% “‘Am I in love with one man or two?’ NOO PLEASE NO TRIANGLEROMANCEFUCK”
Page 220 / 61% “omg jesus why does authors feel the need to create stupid love-triangles???”
Page 260 / 72% “I’m seriously doubting that I’ll ever read the rest of the series.. Has anyone read this book?”
Page 314 / 87% “bleh”
COVER
Haha the one good thing about this book. Seriously.
Favorite quote: “I would love you in any shape, in any world, with any past. Never doubt that. -”
Booknookreading by marlida 