Reflections

In this book’s context, time travel isn’t yet possible but gallivanting through a multiverse of parallel worlds is, which turns out to be at least as cool. Marguerite Caine’s parents have invented a still nascent and not yet fully tested technology that allows users to jump into the lives of their alternate selves in universes that branched off from our own by taking different directions sometime in the past. Marguerite's focus has been more on art than science, but that changes when her father is murdered by one of the two handsome graduate students who have been helping with her parent’s project. The killer escapes to another dimension before police can get involved and Marguerite impulsively takes off after him, tracking him through several universes with the help of the other handsome graduate student.

The multiverse aspect of the story is phenomenal and the basic storyline--main character jumping in and out of multiple realities, taking up her alternate lives in those worlds while trying to find and kill her father’s murderer--kept me utterly enthralled. The universes Marguerite travels through take her to a grim, gray London with technology far more advanced than our own, a present day but pre-industrial Russia still ruled by resplendent Romanovs, and an Earth where land mass has already been drastically reduced by climate change and the alternate Marguerite lives with her parents in an experimental underwater community.

While the settings are fascinating and well drawn, another major part of the plot is a love triangle romance that weakened the story for me because it felt implausible, forced and awkward. Then again, I’m several decades beyond the YA demographic so it might read differently for someone younger. I enjoyed the other aspects of the story so much that I read it almost straight through, and since A Thousand Pieces of You is the first book of a trilogy I will definitely be checking out the sequels.