Poudelivre

I read Claudia Gray’s A Thousand Pieces of You for the first time last year and in anticipation of the sequel (which came out November 3) I wanted to reread it to get my memory a little fresh on all the things that happened. What struck me most when reading it now was how different it felt from the first time I read it. It's been a year, and I thought good things about it since, but it seemed to have changed from what I remembered. It was still good, just not as good as I recall.

Marguerite is the only member in a family of four who is not invested in science. Both her parents and her older sister are extremely smart, but Marguerite prefers drawing to equations. Her mother and father has, together with two assistants, Theo and Paul, managed to build a device called the Firebird, which allows people to travel through dimensions. Marguerite is proud of what the people she love has accomplished, but she doesn’t pay much attention to it since she has trouble following in the heavy science talk. But now that it turns out that Paul not only erased her parents data and stole the only working Firebird, but also killed her father and fled into another dimension to hide, Marguerite realizes that all those things that she didn’t pay attention to at the dinner table is applying to her. Because Theo has manage to rebuild two Firebirds and together with him, Marguerite leaps after Paul into another world, to catch her father’s killer. But while she’s living the life of different versions of herself, Marguerite slowly realizes that what happened to her dad wasn’t quite what it seemed at first.

This is a very interesting novel, not only talking about crossing different dimension (and getting to experience many different lives) but also about right or wrong. Marguerite wants revenge for what Paul did to her father, but can she kill a man, even though he is a killer himself? She also realizes that jumping into another dimension (and taking the place of that dimensions version of you, which means you share that versions body but their subconscious is something like sleeping while you're "in charge", rather than having two of you walking around at the same time) is violating for the person being taken over. Marguerite has to make a lot of choices and decisions which she, basically, steals from the current dimension’s version of herself. This was something that annoyed me while reading, but I liked that Marguerite at least was aware of this fact herself.

I can’t quite put a finger on why I didn’t like this as much as I remember doing or what felt a little off. What you could’ve changed to make it go from good to great. Maybe because, despite being very interesting from a science perspective, it’s still quite fluffy. It is, at the core, a love story, almost bordering on a love triangle. A big part of the novel was centered around this and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it since I couldn’t remember it being such a big part of the novel the first time I read it. It is clear that I see the story with new eyes now, that I have grown and changed in the past year, and it is interesting seeing how your perspective changes in just a year. I am a little disappointed however, but I hope that the sequel, Ten Thousand Skies Above You, will make me feel better about the series overall. I do recommend A Thousand Pieces of You to people interested in multiverse, but I advise you to not have the highest expectations when starting it.