A Thousand Pieces of You

A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Move over, time travel. Parallel universes are where it's at.

Who among us doesn't love to think about how life might be in a parallel dimension? The possibilities are endless and varied, as Claudia Gray has so aptly shown. A Thousand Pieces of you is one part sci-fi, one part historical, two parts romance and one part murder mystery. And it all works together to make a great story.

Marguerite is our main character. Her parents are both physics professors and her mother invented a device called The Firebird. This enables a person's consciousness to jump into alternate universes, inhabiting the duplicate person there. The parents also have two grad students, Theo and Paul, both treated like members of the family.

Everything begins with Marguerite mourning the death of her father and chasing his killer across an alternate dimension in London. Marguerite and Theo are chasing Paul, the alleged murderer. Things are interesting and get even more interesting as the three jump from dimension to dimension.Things stay interesting because of the differences in the universes, all caused by the choices made there. One can have flying cars and transporters while another can be just entering the industrial revolution. Another could be as similar to the universe of origin with only slight changes, like the color of a shirt or paint on a wall.

Gray handles the science of all this relatively well, although I did have a few problems with it. In stories like this, an author needs to establish certain rules and stick to them. This is tricky at times because of the way things need to be explained. Plot holes can occur when an author breaks her own rules.

This happens a few times. For example the Firebird is worn as a locket around the neck. Gray established a rule of travel wherein physical objects can't transfer; only energy can go between dimensions, hence the travel of the consciousness of a person and not the actual physical person. There are no dopplegangers in the dimensions when they travel. But, the Firebird travels with the characters and appears as a physical object around their necks. So do physical objects transfer or not?

Another problem arises in separating the Firebird from a traveler. It causes the traveler to forget who they are and allow the person in that universe to stay the same. Otherwise the traveler is in control - except where does the person in that universe go? This was never adequately explained other than to say that the person had no memory of the traveler inhabiting their body. This rule was broken when one of the travelers was separated from his Firebird - and yet he had memories of the person he was inhabiting while that person was in control.

Also lacking an explanation was the way the travelers were able to track one another and even direct their travel. Apparently this was just something the Firebird could do - but how? Was it a setting on the device? Did it communicate with the traveler somehow? It never made much sense to me.

Beyond the rule breaking, there were some conflicts in the way the main character behaved. There were times that Marguerite wasn't proactive in changing her circumstances. She had a mission to continue to search for her father's killer - but for a big chunk of the story she just waited around until events aligned rather than going out and making things happen. To some degree this was limited by the societal rules and limitations of dimension she was in. But it seemed contradictory to me because she was so committed to her goal. Granted, doing this within the plot allowed for the exploration of one particular dimension and lent to character development and the establishing of the romance. It was interesting and exciting. But for me, it seemed contradictory to Marguerite's character on the whole.

The overall character development here is great, especially because you have varying versions of each person. Death is relative; someone may die in one universe but be alive in the next - so how does that affect the grief process? Gray capitalizes on the similarities and differences in each person to further enhance the plot. It makes for a story that it hard to put down.

In the end, this was a great story. There's no cliffhanger (thank you Claudia Gray!) but the ending certainly leaves room for the continuation of the series. It's a great idea executed relatively well, especially when plots like this are so tricky to achieve. I really liked it despite its problems. I'll be reading the sequels.


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