59 pages • 1 hour read
Tillie ColeA Thousand Broken Pieces
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Series Context: A Thousand Boy Kisses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
A Thousand Broken Pieces is a direct sequel to Tillie Cole’s 2016 novel A Thousand Boy Kisses. The first novel in the series focuses on Poppy and Rune, two children living in Blossom Grove, Georgia. After moving to Georgia from Norway, Rune adjusts by befriending Poppy, whose grandmother’s deathbed request is that she collect 1,000 memorable kisses with boys. Rune kisses Poppy, which develops into a long-lasting relationship. When Rune’s family must move back to Norway, Rune is consumed by anger and sadness. Rune returns two years later after losing contact with Poppy, who he is devastated to learn has cancer and only a couple months to live. They spend their time collecting 1,000 kisses, and the main narrative ends with Poppy’s death and Rune’s attempts to cope (the Epilogue reveals that Rune, too, will die young).
A Thousand Broken Pieces follows Savannah, Poppy’s younger sister, and explores her grief following Poppy’s death. As Savannah struggles to overcome her loss, she, like Poppy, begins a relationship with a boy consumed by anger, Cael. However, where Poppy’s death is the inevitable conclusion of her relationship with Rune, Savannah and Cael’s relationship unfolds against a backdrop of recovery from grief, developing themes of Learning to Love After Loss and The Power of Human Connection in Recovery. Though their relationship, like Rune and Poppy’s, contains elements of both sadness and joy, they end the novel happy and engaged. A Thousand Broken Pieces thus offers a look into the life of a supporting character from the first novel, exploring the effect that the main characters from A Thousand Broken Pieces had on Savannah but also giving Savannah a full story of her own.
Genre Context: Young Adult Romance and “Sick Lit”
Young adult books are commonly marketed to teenagers, using adolescent characters, straightforward narrative structure, and topics and themes appropriate and intriguing for the age group. Young adult romance novels combine these traits with those of romance, including love interests, relationship building, and endings that involve the emotional satisfaction of a resolved love story, commonly achieved through marriage, sex, or another climactic finality. Young adult romance has become an increasingly popular romance subgenre in the 21st century, as the success of works like A Thousand Broken Pieces affirms.
However, if the novel is a clear example of young adult romance, its placement in this genre is nevertheless complicated by its interest in mental health, which makes it an unconventional entry to the “sick lit” subgenre of young adult romance. As its name suggests, this subgenre features characters living with a major illness, often using their experiences to teach readers and characters a lesson about living life to the fullest. For this reason, the genre has attracted criticism from those who view it as exploitative; in fact, author John Green intended for his novel The Fault in Our Stars to function as a subversion of the subgenre, though it ultimately helped cement the genre’s popularity. Other well-known additions to the genre include Rachel Lippincott’s Five Feet Apart (2018) and Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything (2015). A Thousand Boy Kisses also falls into this category, as Poppy’s illness and death resolve with the life lesson to live every day to the fullest. However, A Thousand Broken Pieces is unique in that it shifts focus from people with physical illnesses to those with mental health struggles: Cael and Savannah do not learn to live from each other’s deaths but from their shared need to overcome their grief.
