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A review by pestowitch
A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
2.0
How can a book about interdimensional travel be so horrendously boring and predictable?
This book started out great - the premise is interesting and the plot moved at a decent pace. But after about 30% I became bored, and then as I went on just plain irritated.
There is the entire multiverse to explore, and the parallel dimensions we visit are: a technologically advanced London, Russian royalty, everything is the same but her dad is alive, and underwater research station. Nothing about these worlds excited me?
The romance was truly mediocre, which is an issue considering it takes up the majority of the book. Marguerite goes from talking about how she has feelings for/wants to sleep with Theo to being ~in love~ with Russian soldier!Paul in the space of, like, a WEEK. It was the dullest kind of insta-love.
I also have serious reservations about Marguerite using her alt!self's body to have sex with Russian soldier!Paul. It creeped me out. Marguerite remarks that Theo seemed violated by his alt!self jumping into his body, and wonders how her alt!selves felt when she did it to them, but that's where the thought just entirely stops. There was so much potential there to explore personhood and autonomy and ~what makes us who we are~ and yet none of that was explored whatsoever.
None of the characters beyond Marguerite felt very fleshed out at all. We barely saw enough of any of them (including real!Paul and real!Theo) to get a sense of who they were. Every piece of information we got about who both of these boys were came from sections of exposition from Marguerite's perspective, rather than from seeing them in action.
I also guessed the "twist" at the end when I was only 30 pages in and it was thoroughly underwhelming to see it come to fruition.
Honestly, I am so disappointed in this book. It keeps a star because the writing style wasn't bad and had nice bits of lyrical prose, plus the premise is pretty good. But everything thing beyond that was a huge let down for me.
This book started out great - the premise is interesting and the plot moved at a decent pace. But after about 30% I became bored, and then as I went on just plain irritated.
There is the entire multiverse to explore, and the parallel dimensions we visit are: a technologically advanced London, Russian royalty, everything is the same but her dad is alive, and underwater research station. Nothing about these worlds excited me?
The romance was truly mediocre, which is an issue considering it takes up the majority of the book. Marguerite goes from talking about how she has feelings for/wants to sleep with Theo to being ~in love~ with Russian soldier!Paul in the space of, like, a WEEK. It was the dullest kind of insta-love.
I also have serious reservations about Marguerite using her alt!self's body to have sex with Russian soldier!Paul. It creeped me out. Marguerite remarks that Theo seemed violated by his alt!self jumping into his body, and wonders how her alt!selves felt when she did it to them, but that's where the thought just entirely stops. There was so much potential there to explore personhood and autonomy and ~what makes us who we are~ and yet none of that was explored whatsoever.
None of the characters beyond Marguerite felt very fleshed out at all. We barely saw enough of any of them (including real!Paul and real!Theo) to get a sense of who they were. Every piece of information we got about who both of these boys were came from sections of exposition from Marguerite's perspective, rather than from seeing them in action.
I also guessed the "twist" at the end when I was only 30 pages in and it was thoroughly underwhelming to see it come to fruition.
Honestly, I am so disappointed in this book. It keeps a star because the writing style wasn't bad and had nice bits of lyrical prose, plus the premise is pretty good. But everything thing beyond that was a huge let down for me.