A Thousand Pieces of You

Firebird, Book 1

By: Claudia Gray

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

A thousand lives.

A thousand possibilities.

One fate.

Marguerite Caine grew up surrounded by cutting-edge scientific theories, thanks to her brilliant physicist parents. Yet nothing is more astounding than her mother's latest invention - a device called the Firebird, which allows people to leap into alternate dimensions.

When Marguerite's father is murdered, all the evidence points to one person - Paul, her parents' enigmatic star student. Before the law can touch him, Paul escapes into another dimension, having committed what seems like the perfect crime. But he didn't count on Marguerite. She doesn't know if she can kill a man, but she's going to find out.

With the help of another physics student, Theo, Marguerite chases Paul through various dimensions. In each new world Marguerite leaps to, she meets another version of Paul that has her doubting his guilt and questioning her heart. Is she doomed to repeat the same betrayal?

As Marguerite races through these wildly different lives - a grand duchess in a Tsarist Russia, a club-hopping orphan in a futuristic London, a refugee from worldwide flooding on a station in the heart of the ocean - she is swept into an epic love affair as dangerous as it is irresistible.

©2014 Amy Vincent (P)2014 HarperCollins Publishers

Took a while to get into

Took a while to get into the characters. The voice was annoying. Interesting ending. While I don’t regret buying the book, I don’t have an interest in continuing on with these characters in the sequels.

AU!!

I love a good Alternate Universe book, and this really is a great one. The plot starts simple enough, jump to different Alternate Universes chasing down the MCs killer. But as we explore these vastly different versions of the similar, a deeper, dangerous plot begins to unravel and I loved every moment of it.

Amazing

Great story with twists and turns of drama and suspense... Great description, painting a perfect picture to pull the reader/listener into the story.

Don't look at this review.

Don't look at this review. Just putting words in a line and not reviewing. Listening as I do this.

Love Triangle, not my thing!

Forced myself to finish this book. Too much love story nonsense. I thought this book would offer more of a scientific brain tease. Very dissatisfied.

Not Sci-Fi. Mostly Rory Gilmore introspection.

Not going to point out an essay on the iPhone, but...

I thought this would be an updated version of Sliders from Sci-fi. Instead it's a book that too hard tries to make the tension from a love triangle last as long as possible. 80% of this book is introspective thought, usually about a boy, then the narrator, then family.

Parts are painful to get through. This girl accepts on faith a mission to kill the man she is in love with, doesn't understand half of the ideas involved, and doesn't really even direct her own narrative until the very end. In fact, I think she has two scenes of significance where she makes her own decisions and isn't being escorted by a lover (both times waiting for rescue). Ok, three (London, Russia, Waterworld). Rescued every time.

So if you want to feed some inner dialogue to the home-made robot girl you're tinkering with in the basement, this motherload is all the drama you'll need.

Kudos to the illustrator and voice actor. The russian and french accents are cringeworthy, but maybe they are in real life, too.

cool aspect

This was a different aspect of time travel that I'd not seen in a book before. While the timelines were complicated, the author describes them in a way that it believable and understandable. The love triangle is a good twist, too.

Speeches

This. Book. Is. Just. Amazing! I couldn't put it down! I'm obsessed with the world the writer created. Claudia Gray, well done!!!

Very cute

Such a fun story! I totally wanted there to be more when the book came to the end. A really great read :)

Fun dimensional hopping, bland characters

This is a little bit of a conundrum for me. As a person who rarely consumes (and enjoys) Sci-Fi, finding out while I was reading this book (which I also picked up just after watching Everything Everywhere All at Once) that I love this kind of dimensional hopping is really exciting and makes me want to pick up more books with the same trope, which is always really fun. Especially when it's a genre trope that I don't usually reach for.
I also enjoyed that 2 out of 3 main characters are PhD students like myself, which I found fun and relatable. And even if at times that portrayal seemed somewhat unrealistic, I don't begrudge the book for it, since having PhD students as protagonists was so fun and refreshing for me.

That being said, having such bland protagonists as Marguerite and Paul was boring. Paul's fate talk was eye-roll inducing, especially being a PhD student like Paul (albeit a mathematician, not a physicist). The presence of a love triangle wasn't helping either.

I also didn't like how the author decided to treat the only character that has some personality and isn't blander than white bread, aka Theo. I hope that he gets better treatment as a character in the rest of the series, tho I am doubtful, especially because I guessed where the author planned to take his development from the start of the book.

The narrator Tavia Gilbert was good and pleasant to listen to and her voices for all of the characters are very distinct. Now, I am not Russian so I cannot speak for the quality of her accent, but I, at least, didn't mind it.

I will be continuing on with this series mostly because I want more fun dimension hopping rather than the characters, which is such a weird thing to say for a character driven reader like me. But I guess that it helps that I didn't actively dislike any of the characters. I guess that I can look pass the blandness, so long as the other things are fun enough.