Review: A Thousand Pieces of You

★☆☆☆☆

I've decided to be more liberal with my 1-star reviews, because I realized recently that I haven't given a book one star in a few years. Why does the 1-star option exist, if not for books I couldn't even finish?

Which brings me to my confession: I did not finish this book. You can choose whether to take heed of my review or not. I mean, personally, I think the whole "You can't review a book if you didn't finish it" rule is totally invalid — people have reasonsfor not finishing books, and knowing what they are might stop you from wasting your time. Sometimes it's just a "This book wasn't for me" situation, but sometimes it's not.

This one was not.

"My hand shakes as I brace myself against the brick wall."

That, my friends, is the first sentence of A Thousand Pieces of You. Wow, what a rousing start. How am I ever going to put this book down after that?! Forget The Knife of Never Letting Go and "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say." Forget The Night Circus and "The circus arrives without warning." This one clearly has them beat with that epic line about a brick wall. 

Snark aside: this first sentence tells you absolutely nothing, right? It's not specific to this book at all, which raises a red flag because it's a clear promise of bad writing.

And bad writing ye shall receive! Where do I even start? Okay, I know this book is YA, but here's the thing: I love YA. At least ninety percent of my favorite books are YA. But as a YA reader, I felt like Claudia Gray was talking down to me in this story. Every. single. thing. is right there on the page. There is nothing to infer, nothing to think about. Reading is supposed to be an experience where I can feel with the characters; I don't need their every emotion and question and thought spelled out for me. The writing in this one leaves nothing for me to do other than, well, read. And that's the most unsatisfying kind of writing there is. ("But, Paige," you might say, "you're not a teenager! This book isn't intended for you!" — to which I say, "BALONEY." All books are written for the people who like them. I like YA books, so this book is supposed to be written for me.)

All this transparency left nothing for me to attach myself to. Everything feels flat, like I'm being told This Is The Story You Are Reading instead of getting to feel like I was a part of it. I don't know if Claudia Gray (or whatever her real name is) has a degree in writing, but I'd venture a big no on that one — which is fine, because I don't think you need a degree in writing to be a good writer. But it would definitely help in her case, because reading this book felt exactly like workshopping a grad student's manuscript. It would have been easy to improve the writing quality and make it feel less like the author didn't trust the reader to understand, but nobody put forth that effort.

Unfortunately, the writing style wasn't the only bad thing about the book. The main character, Marguerite, is exactly as unbearable as her name. In the half of the book that I read, she did nothing but complain, contradict herself, fawn over her two love interests, and judge people. I think the fact that she's an "artist" (throw in a couple generic art references and bam! Your heroine is supposedly an artist!) is supposed to make her interesting, but we never actually see her doing any art. She doesn't look at the world with an artist's eye. Being an "artist" changes nothing about her perspective, other than making her the self-declared black sheep of the family, the special snowflake who likes art instead of science. Oh, the poor little runt.

The love interests were not much better. You've got the probable drug addict and the accused murderer, great! I could totally get behind that, if I believed that either of these guys were actually either of those things. But they're not. They're both Bad Boys Lite™, and Marguerite cares more about them than she cares about accomplishing anything. She starts off the book promising to kill Paul Markov, and then not even halfway through it he's all "But I'm innocent!" and she's all "Oh, okay." [implied: "What a relief because I never really intended to kill you anyway, on account of I am way too bland and also have no experience killing people. Also I think, maybe, not sure because apparently I haven't thought about it enough even though it's all I've been talking about, I might be in love with you."] They're both in love with her for some reason (I believe Paul more than I believe Theo, who's basically just a pathological flirt, but neither of them totally convinced me) and she's pretty much willing to go for Theo because he makes it more clear, until Paul tells her his feelings and that's the end of that. The bromance between the two of them totally could have hooked me — I am a bromance fiend, after all — but it was barely even there! Why do you promise me a beautiful platonic relationship and then not deliver?!

At this point I don't think I need to get started on the plot, so I'll just say that it was half-assed at best. So many things go unexplained in this book: questions that characters can't answer because the author couldn't answer them. Other reviewers have mentioned this, so just read the other 1-star reviews if you need examples. I'm off to read something that's actually worth my time.

Shame about that cover, though. It deserved better.