Finished reading 20th November 2015

Title: Shatter Me

Author: Tahereh Mafi

Series Status: The 1st book in the Shatter Me trilogy

Publisher: Harper Collins

Number of Pages: 338

 

(Found on Goodreads)

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.

I finally picked this book up and read it, and I’m glad I did. It didn’t turn out as I expected it to be.

As I started reading it, there were MILLIONS a lot of questions running through my head. What happened to Juliette? She’s been locked up for so long, is she sane? What’s happened to the world outside? It’s these very questions that made me read through 100 pages of the book without even realizing how far I’d gotten.

The book is written from Juliette’s point of view. At the start she seems to ramble a lot, but not in an annoying way. She repeats herself, giving you a hint of the things she focuses on most. You can see her mind work as she crosses out certain words and phrases, composing herself as she tells the story.

The world building is done through her eyes. Her appreciation for small details is almost refreshing, since the world in this book seems such a bleak place. I just really liked Tahereh Mafi’s way of describing through Juliette’s eyes. I mean seriously, the fact that Juliette spends a lot of time reading is touched upon, but instead of just saying “I’ve spent a lot of time reading”, Juliette says…

In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

If that’s not an example of Tahereh Mafi’s stunning way with words, then I don’t know what is.

Once you hit the 100 page mark, the story becomes incredibly fast paced. It sort of snowballs – the further you get, the more happens. There’s a huge mix of what happens in the story. There’s the typical issue with the world, mixed in with slight fantasy and a romance. I was happy to find the romance wasn’t overwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely there, but it was written in a way that had me rooting for them instead of thinking “yeah yeah get on with the story.”

Towards the end a lot of new things are sort of thrown at you. New characters, new places, new story lines. Plus it also kind of reminded me of X-men. Which I wasn’t expecting at all. It was believable though. The sudden rush of new information seemed to fit in with the recent events of the story.

One thing I will say is that it was a very open ending, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next book in the series! I have to know what happens now!

Rated 4//5 stars!

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