A THOUSAND PIECES OF YOU

A girl and her two possible heartthrobs travel across parallel universes to avenge her father’s murder.

Marguerite’s parents are both brilliant scientists, inventors of a device called the Firebird that allows the bearer to travel across the multiverse. When her dad dies in a car crash after his brake lines have been cut, everyone blames Paul, one of two research assistants working for the couple. But Paul has escaped by using the Firebird to travel to another universe. Theo, the other assistant, teams up with Marguerite in a prototype to chase Paul. They discover that although some things are different from universe to universe—technology in particular—the people are the same. Inhabiting the bodies of their parallel selves, they find Paul, but things go awry and they wind up traveling to yet another world: a nicely drawn parallel czarist Russia where Marguerite is the czarevna and secretly in love with that world’s Paul. But she’s also attracted to Theo. And, in the parallel worlds, who is really who? Gray doesn’t worry much about actual science in her science fiction, muddling the concept of multiple universes with that of multiple dimensions, but she keeps the plot moving and has some good fun keeping all of the parallel people sorted.

This trilogy opener offers solid entertainment for readers willing to go with the fictional flow.