“Your family is the most important part of your life. Your families are the people you love, and love is what separates us from scoundrels and criminals. It maintains order. Your parents, your sibling, and your Partner, are the ones you love. There should never, ever, be anyone else who comes close to that bond. You have only one best friend, and that is the person you’ll be marrying someday. We … someday. We must learn to differentiate the relationships in our lives: the people we love, and the ones we don’t. It’s inappropriate, it’s foolish, and it’s forbidden to think otherwise.”
Trace Bailey’s mouth is her worst enemy – somehow it always gets her in trouble. Luckily, she has a partner in crime – her best friend and neighbor since age seven, Piren Allston. He can’t get enough of her crazy sense of humor, and she loves that he’s always up for another adventure.
They can’t be friends, though, not in their world. Trace and Piren were Assigned to other people at the age of six, and they’re supposed to marry their Partners when they turn twenty-four. Failure to comply leads to Banishment, a fate worse than death.
Worse still is the growing realization that their bond is stronger than just friendship.
In a world without freedom, there are still choices to be made. Following their hearts means losing their family, but following the law means losing each other.
Forever.
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“Love is not a light switch you can flip on and off as you please. It’s not something you can manufacture or create. It’s not a decision you can make. You can’t destroy it with a law, or beat it out with fists. It swarms you when you least expect it, and grabs hold of you.”
Tracy Bailey and Piren Allston live in world where they are told who to love. At the age of six, children are assigned a Partner based on genetic codes, ensuring that they will produce the strongest offspring possible. Best friends since the age of seven, Trace and Piren knew their friendship was wrong. Their parents, teachers and Partners tried to keep them apart, but no matter how many times they were told to love someone else, they couldn’t let each other go.
Missing Pieces is a love story that spans years, starting at the age of seven and moving through time, we watch Trace and Piren grow up together and slowly turn from best friends into something impossible for them to define with words. Think Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, but with more feeling, more reality and more heartbreak. In Trace and Piren’s world, love is not outlawed, but it has been so distorted that it’s almost impossible for people to recognize the emotion anymore. Starting with the Assigning Ceremony at the age of six, the word love is flung around so often it loses all meaning.
”Love. I tell Lara I love her. What the hell does that even mean? Have I overused it to the point where it’s just as damn meaningless as any mundane word?”
You marry who you are told to marry, when they tell you to marry them, and you do it happily. Without question. Failure to comply ends up in Banishment, a fate worse than death according to the government. Your family turns their back on you, and you can never return home. You are an outcast.
Twice in the past few months I’ve picked up a dystopian novel and felt let down because it revolved around a romance, not the fight against an oppressive system. I found myself saying one thing: I don’t like dystopian love stories. Meredith Tate has proven me wrong with Missing Pieces. From the first sentence I was enthralled with the story. Pulled into Trace and Piren’s lives in a way I couldn’t have imagined possible. Feeling their pain and joy, suffering with them as they faced a future full of unhappiness and hopelessness.
The thing about Missing Pieces I found so amazing is the subtle world-building. This isn’t a Divergent or Hunger Games type future. On the surface, it isn’t ugly and dark and unhappy. People have homes and kids and jobs. At first glimpse, they aren’t suffering. It is our world and our time, with one major difference. The lack of love. You see it in almost every character. The marriages that are so unhappy the participants try to drown themselves in alcohol, the monotony of life turning people into zombies who run on autopilot. The violence, the jealousy. People feeling trapped and lost in the meaningless of an existence devoid of love.
”Lara and I sit in silence in a cold gray house. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Following a monotonous routine for years. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. We exist until we die. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Is this me? Is this my future? Am I destined to be a ghost in my own home?”
The government supposedly set up the Assignment system to rid the world of adultery and divorce and unhappiness, but without love, society has become a shell of itself. A world that goes through the motions, never really knowing what it means to feel something. Maybe even a little afraid to allow themselves to feel.
As far as dystopian novels go, there isn’t anything ground-breakingly original in Missing Pieces, but I’m not sure it’s even possible come up with a totally unique story anymore. The Assignments in this novel can be compared to Matched, the secret love to Delirium, the scene where Piren is swept up in the chaos of the moment and flinging insults at the adulterers felt like something straight out of 1984. Every dystopian novel you pick up can most likely be compared to another one already published, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Readers gravitate toward one genre for a reason, because there’s something about it that speaks to them. Missing Pieces, however, is unique in the fact that it is such a character driven story. Piren and Trace carry the story, and their personalities are so fleshed-out that as you’re reading, it becomes easy to forget they aren’t real, and that their problems aren’t something we will ever have to face.
Trace’s personality especially stood out to me. Her troubled home, leading to her boisterous personality and her questioning mind. She saw first-hand how messed-up the Assignment system was in the heartache it had caused in her family life. She felt it in her father’s anger and abuse, so it only made sense that she’d have a desire for something more in life. Piren had always been her one true friend. The only person she could depend on to take care of her when she needed it. And it was Piren’s strong commitment to the people he loved that made him believable, as well as helped move the plot forward. He didn’t selfishly desire to make only himself happy. He wanted everyone to be happy, and he knew embracing his love for Trace would devastate and embarrass his family. Piren even looked out for Lara, who could never be accused of being nice to him. It was Piren’s overall kindness, combined with Trace’s passion for life, that made these two characters fit together so perfectly in the end.
Missing Pieces has been categorized as New Adult, but readers both young and old will enjoy it. It’s about love versus duty, about keeping promises and embracing happiness. Thanks to Meredith Tate, I’ll never again be able to say I don’t like dystopian stories that center around romance. I not only thoroughly enjoyed Missing Pieces, but I would highly recommend it to any fans of the dystopian genre.