Liz hopes that her senior year might turn into a real-life romantic fantasy, as an old crush has moved back to town, cuter and nicer than ever.

Liz Buxbaum has always adored rom-coms, not least for helping her still feel close to her screenwriter mother, who died when she was little.

There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.Ī grieving teen’s devotion to romance films might ruin her chances at actual romance. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. This trilogy opener offers solid entertainment for readers willing to go with the fictional flow. 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. 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. They discover that although some things are different from universe to universe-technology in particular-the people are the same. Theo, the other assistant, teams up with Marguerite in a prototype to chase Paul. But Paul has escaped by using the Firebird to travel to another universe. 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. Marguerite’s parents are both brilliant scientists, inventors of a device called the Firebird that allows the bearer to travel across the multiverse. A girl and her two possible heartthrobs travel across parallel universes to avenge her father’s murder.

A thousand pieces of you series