A Thousand Pieces of You Review

This week's novel is A Thousand Pieces of You, YA sci-fi with travel through alternate universes by Claudia Gray.  This one was recommended by the Writing Excuses Podcast as one of their books of the week.

Marguerite's genious, physicist mother not only proves that alternate universes exist, but creates a prototype device that will allow travel between these universes.  When Paul, one of her grad students, erases all their data, steals the device, kills Marguerite's dad, and escapes to an alternate universe, Marguerite and Theo (the other grad student) set out of an adventure across universes to find him and seek their revenge.

Even though there are a whole lot of physicists in this book and a whole bunch of science going on, nothing leaps out at me as THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS.  Which is awesome.  Great job, Gray!  I think this is because Marguerite has no interest in how or why anything works and when people give her an explanation, she tunes it out.  Since we're seeing this adventure from her perspective, her explanations of "because SCIENCE!" and "it's all very technical" ring true.  I buy she doesn't know what's happening and I buy that something is happening that's technical.  There's no trying to dig into pseudo-science to explain.  And she does get a lot of the culture and the pitfalls in trying to get funding correct, which is something a scientist's kid would know about.

The universes she travels too are also really interesting.  They vary tremendously from a world with advanced technology where she lives in London with her aunt, to a world with technology behind ours where she is a Romanov princess in St Petersburg.  It's a wild ride through different environments.  But then she goes to a world eerily similar to her own, and that's creepy in its own right.  Everything was vivid and interesting.

It quickly got into the ethics of interdenominational travel.  When you travel, your consiousness inhabits your body in that universe.  That means you can't jump into a universe where you don't exist.  It also means you're taking over the body of a version of yourself and hijacking their life.  You have to fool their family and friends to impersonate them, and doing something out of character could ruin their life.  So how ethical is that?

Then there's the question of how similar all the different versions of you are.  If you love a grad student in one universe, do you love him in every universe?  If a grad student is evil in one universe are their counterparts in every universe evil or do they all just have that capacity deep inside?  It's an interesting look at how situation and chance can affect personality, and this gets at it from several different directions.

It was a lot of fun, but that said I did guess the twist in chapter 2.

***

Next week: Sunshine, cinnamon rolls and vampires by Robin McKinley.