Review: A Thousand Pieces of You (AKA: Can I stab it with a basilisk fang?)

 A Thousand Pieces of You
Author: Claudia Gray
Publication Date: November 4th 2014        
Publisher: Harper Teen
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~

Every Day meets Cloud Atlas in this heart-racing, space- and time-bending, epic new trilogy from New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray.

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

I'll let you into a little secret, I'm not an optimist. I look for the bad in books first before looking for the good,  so when I love a book despite its faults, that's when I know I truly love a book. Even if I do dislike it or have some issues with it, I usually can find redeemable qualities. Now, this isn't like with debuts where it can go either way, I wasn't worried about A Thousand Pieces of You at all, it's Claudia Gray, you guys, I had no doubt I would love it. I haven't finished the Evernight series, I've read up until the third I think, but I liked them, I read Fateful and loved that-because hello, Titanic-and I've started the Spellcaster series and loved the way the magic is represented, so A Thousand Pieces of You was a must read. Which is why I'm so disappointed that I absolutely hated it. The only redeemable quality I can find is the fact we jump to different times and different countries dimensions, but even then, I was too pissed off with the characters and their actions to actually enjoy it, and for most of it, it just felt like we were just given the run around.

I wanted it to be like All Our Yesterdays, even though that's more of a time travelling past/future/present thing and a whole different amount of jargon and A Thousand Pieces of You is dimension travelling, but I was expecting to love the characters as much as I loved Em and Finn. This is where it went wrong for me, straight from the off, because of the characters, and mainly our lovely Marguerite, and by lovely I mean, I wanted to hit her in the face, a lot. For a ton of different reasons that just add up to I want to hit her in the face. For the first 50% mainly for superficial things that irked me, like these.

"Maybe the technology is different, but the shallowness of the scene is probably universal. So this is the life my father escaped when he chose to go into science, to leave Great Britain and join Mom in California. He was even smarter than I knew."

That quote is set in a  scene from London, I'm not from London, but as someone whose from Great Britain, yeah... I'm offended. A lot. But it's an ironic quote really, because Marguerite's too shallow to understand her own shallowness. But I carried on.

To this quote.

"At home, I refuse to wear fur because I think it's disgusting, but I'm grateful for its warmth now. Sorry, little sables. I swear this time you gave your life in a good cause."

This just shows how lovely our character really is, it may seem minor, but added upon other quotes, too much to mention, added up to a whole lot of pretentious bullshit. I thought maybe the things she was experiencing once hitting Russia would help her character to grow, and in a way she did, but for me, I began to like her less, which brings us to a scene that entirely made me angry. This is a minor spoiler-it doesn't reveal anything about the plot or anything-but I'll lighten it anyway, so...

Our Marguerite falls in love with the Russian dimension Paul, and shortly after quote two, they sleep together. Now, here's my problem. The original Marguerite is in the Russian dimension version of herself, the original Marguerite has sex with Russian Paul without any thought-only after- that that was wrong. I don't care if the Russian version of Marguerite is still technically her but with differences, and that she too, was in love with Paul. I don't care because that was nobody else's decision but Russian Marguerite's, and that was taken from her by our Marguerite. It's essentially rape, not traditionally, but the essence is still the same. Russian Marguerite had no choice in the matter, and even our Marguerite decides that, she's pretty sure Russian Marguerite would've done the same thing. She takes that decision from her. No, just no.

 

Am I the only person who finds that inexcusably wrong?

That was the last straw for me, the twists were predictable, and the only reason I finished it was because I wanted to see if it was worth it.

Spoiler: I wish I had a firebird to travel to a dimension where I never read A Thousand Pieces of You, sorry.

 

Rating: 1/5