When you lose something or someone, it can feel as if something inside you is lost and broken. You feel as though you’ll never be who you once were, before tragedy struck, like in A Thousand Broken Pieces. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance are seen as the five stages of grief, but not every person has the same intensity, journey or self care when these emotions find them.
A unique tale of two young people who start to heal themselves, in mind and heart, as they learn ways to see themselves and heal on their respective journeys, as they start to grow in themselves and their shared connection. This story is more than a romance, and happily ever after doesn’t come by magic. It’s a long labouring road of learning to live for and love yourself, and finding someone who loves all parts of you, and supports you, in the good times and bad. Most importantly, it’s an heart wrenching yet soul healing story of understanding, coping and living with grief.
The emotions and struggles it brings doesn’t not make you stronger, but rather it takes courage to rebuild our dreams and hearts. If you’re having a difficult time with your mental health is not something to be ashamed of and not something you have to do alone. It shows just how strong you are and will be, even if you don’t believe it.
For Savannah, that includes her anxiety, for Cael it’s his anger, with both experiencing a wider range of emotions and feelings during their journeys. Neither emotion or stage they’re in of their journeys is more or less valid or in need of care and healing than the other. There is no time limit or box that contains the struggles such as your mental health or your grief. They come from everywhere but light can be regained in the darkness. This is something Savannah and Cael learn on their international group trip, meant to help them understand, expose themselves to and start to cope and heal from their own grief and its effects on their mental health, in their own ways.
It all starts when Savannah and Cael are offered places on a international trip for young people struggling with grief, and mental health. Savannah has been living half a life ever since her sister Poppy passed away from Cancer. Forever frozen in a state of anxiety and grief. Cael has hidden away, closing himself off from reminders of his brother, his dreams and people. He harbours anger and depression in the year, since his brother took his own life.
Both coming from different places, Savannah and Carl are reluctant and hesitant to understand and expose themselves to their grief, and to admit how bad their mental well being has gotten since their siblings’ deaths. When they meet each other, a connection of shared grief and trauma slowly turns into something more. As they travel from The Lake District to the blossom trees of Tokyo, they are confronted with other their grief, and something, someone to not just survive but live life with. It’s a tearfully healing tale of the reality of grief and love, and how there is no timeline or set path to grief and grieving someone or something you have lost. Everyone has a different story and journey, and the right people will always be by your side, including the ones you find along the way.
On this international trip through grief, readers are exposed to the test of Savannah and Cael’s group, who have all lost different people in their lives in different lives at different times. Tillie Cole paints a hauntingly poetic yet realistic mental and physical battles for her characters. Cael’s anger and depression over his brother’s death and Savannah’s anxiety and fear over confronting a life without her sister.
All the dual povs, constantly switching between Savannah and Cael, provided an heartbreaking, emotional and intense insight into their individual stories, feelings and perspective journeys through grief. Each place they visit on their trip, from The Lake District to Tokyo , exposes their group to different aspects of grief and philosophical and cultural views on life and death. This makes way for outstandingly stark yet real character development for Savannah and Cael despite their rocky starts and for when they start to gravitate towards each other out of love and not just grief.
A thousand broken pieces can become a thousand new shrines of light with the right pieces coming together, in its own time. It’s a tender, bittersweet and intense story of grief, love and the future but the subject matters (of Cole’s book) are handled with extreme sensitivity, understanding and intelligence in how we honour what we have lost.
People aren’t meant to be perfect, people are meant to just be human. We can’t pick our good and bad days, but it’s okay to not be okay, and if there’s one thing we can learn from. That’s what we learn from Thousand Broken Pieces, and that there is still so much more life to live.
the girl and the city of books 
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