Shatter Me ♦ Tahereh Mafi | Review

This book was breathtaking and absolutely surprising. When I read it the first time in 2018 I was so stunned that I couldn’t really get words together to describe my feelings. The characters, the setting and the plot are going seamlessly together. And 5 years later I am still in Aww by the writing style of Tahereh Mafi.

Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war – and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

Shatter Me ♦ Tahereh Mafi

Opinion

Let’s start with the obvious. This cover. I do love it and definitely prefer it over all the other cover editions with a young woman in a dress on it. What’s with that anyway? What does a young woman in a dress should suggest to me? I gotta be honest, I hardly grab books with those covers. But the eye and all its details around it is so much more fitting to the book’s content than some chick in a ball gown.

But let’s get to the writing. Tahereh Mafi blew me away with her writing style. Through other reviews I already know it will be different, but this was spectacular. I loved how she played with all these metaphors and I enjoyed it. Every line is profoundly lovely and contributes something wholly original to an entirely new persona.
But… yeah, there’s a but… I got a bit worn out by all the whining of the protagonist Juliette. Sure as hell, she never had it easy in her life. Not when she was mistreated by her family and the classmates, and definitely not when she was incarcerated for a gift she never had control of. But gosh, that was way too much drowning in self-pity at certain points.

Once she found Adam, or better once they found each other, it got a better and I could watch through the chapters how her will to live and fight for her freedom grew. And my heartache over her suffering got lifted once I realized that she could be a force to be reckoned with. Then there is Adam, the only human being Juliette knows, because they went to school together, and he was never mean to her. Even if he seems nice and genuine about her well beings, there’s something off with him. But I can’t fully wrap my mind around it. Even though I do want him to be THE love interest for her.
And Warner who was sold to me as the antagonist of this book, and by all his actions so far, he is, there might be something behind his mask, that isn’t so evil. But hey, what do I know? I could be totally off with both of the male protagonists. But it all seems to go straight forward into a messed up and chaotic love triangle. I am not so sure how Kenji fits into all this, but this guy has some secrets. Ah never mind, they all got deep dark secrets and the one paying the price will probably be Juliette.

What really caught my interest in Shatter Me was the setting. The post-apocalyptic world sentiment was horrifying, and it sadly doesn’t seem so far from reality. I just couldn’t get enough explaining how it all went down. I also missed the explanation how certain persons got special gifts. But I do hope to find out more about all those questions in the next installments.

Conclusion

A very horrific dystopic world-setting with mysterious abilities of certain protagonists and others, as well as an incipient love triangle in which the end cannot be predicted. All of this is well-packed within an eloquent writing style, which I hadn’t come across yet. I just hope that the whining part of the heroine will fade away.

Shatter Me – The Series

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