Author:
Tahereh Mafi
Genre:
YA, Science Fiction (Dystopian), Romance
Summary
Four
walls of an asylum and a small notebook make up Juliette Ferrars' entire world
until the day a mysterious boy enters her cell. His name is Adam Kent, and he
doesn't seem to remember Juliette--but she remembers him. They went to school
together, back when the world was normal: before the food shortages and the
nuclear bombs and the iron fist rule of The Reestablishment.
Juliette
never fit into the normal world. A touch from her can cause a person to
convulse in pain; if she holds on too long, they die. Now Warner, a young but
ruthless leader, wants to mold her into a weapon for The Reestablishment. He'll
use anything in his power to bend her to his will--including her budding
feelings for Adam. It seems Juliette will only ever cause pain to those closest
to her. Then Adam tells her a secret that will change everything...
Review
My friend
Rita, who writes YA fantasy romances, ardently recommended this book to me. My
reaction wasn't quite as passionate. I liked it okay. And I could see it's
appeal. The book is beautifully written in a unique style that milks emotion
out of every situation--good for romance readers. But the fantasy elements are
unoriginal, the setting is vague, and the plot is thin.
Let's
start with the good stuff.
Tahereh
Mafi writes in a way I haven't seen before, crossing out lines that are too
real, too raw, or too embarrassing, like one would do in a journal. But
Juliette isn't writing in a journal, though it appears that way at first. This
is happening in real time, and the crossed out words represents her
self-editing mind.
"What are you writing?" Cellmate
speaks again.
"Why won't you answer me?" He's
too close too close too close.
No one is ever close enough.
I can
relate to this. I'm always trying to stomp out weird thoughts that pop into my
head. It gives me, the reader, a close connection to Juliette. I'm aware of
even her subconscious thoughts. At the same time, Tahereh Mafi's blend of
metaphor and hyperbole creates an atmosphere of heightened emotion. Every tiny
action is supercharged with meaning.
There
are 15,000 feelings of disbelief hole-punched into my heart.
His eyes are 2 buckets of rainwater: deep,
fresh, clear.
I step backwards and 10,000 tiny particles
shatter between us.
 |
| How poetic |
This
unique style caught my interest from the start and kept me reading.
It had
to, because for the first 50 pages, nothing
happened. Juliette sat in her cell with Adam, feeling strongly, but hardly moving or speaking at all. Even after
she gets out of the mental institution, she ends up locked with a boy again,
for 150 pages this time.
Thank
goodness that this boy is Warner, the
green-eyed, gorgeous, 19-year-old psychopathic murderer who is obsessed with
power, obsessed with Juliette, and obsessed with getting Juliette to accept her
power. When I realized that Warner saw Juliette as more than a weapon--that he
was actually sort of in love with her--then
I began to flip pages quite quickly.
"Don't you dare hate me so
quickly," [Warner] continues. "You might find yourself enjoying this
situation a lot more than you anticipated. Lucky for you, I'm willing to be
patient." He grins. Leans back. "Though it certainly doesn't hurt
that you're so alarmingly beautiful."
I know
I'm not supposed to like Warner. Juliette hates him, is absolutely appalled by
everything he does, calls him a monster to his face. And yet I sensed a
troubled past and a pitiful desperation oozing from Warner's blackened soul. He
needs so badly for Juliette to choose him, and this need makes him vulnerable.
 |
| At least I'm not the only one! |
Was I
crazy? Was this some residue of my adolescent longing for the bad boy? Rita
assured me that I was, in fact, an astute reader, and that Warner gets a ton
more development in the upcoming books. I'm glad. I'd hate to think I was
falling for a creepy stalker for no reason.
I
mentioned before that Tahereh Mafi makes good use of figurative language, and
while this stirs the blood, it makes it very difficult to see what's going on
around the characters. In no place is this more apparent than in the setting. I
tried and tried to get a clear idea of the landscape, but the vague words left
me with an impressionistic blur.
The general population has been distributed
across what's left of the country. Industrial buildings form the spine of the
landscape: tall, rectangular metal boxes stuffed full of machinery. Machinery
intended to strengthen the army, to strengthen The Reestablishment, to destroy
mass quantities of human civilization.
Carbon/ Tar/ Steel
Gray/ Black/ Silver
This is
what I know about the society Juliette inhabits. Ten years ago, it was pretty
much our world. Then the atmosphere became poisonous, the earth stopped
providing food, starvation broke out, and The Reestablishment came to power.
Since The Reestablishment is evil, they set off nuclear bombs and created
orphans and hoarded all the goodies for themselves. For some reason, there
aren't any cars left--except when required by the plot.
 |
| Juliette's World |
Basically,
a generic Dystopia. You might as well ignore the setting altogether.
Shatter Me had hints of X-Men
right from the start. It's hard not to compare Juliette to Rogue. Initially, I
shrugged it off as coincidence and tried to put that comparison out of my mind.
But the ending threw all subtlety out the window. It's X-men + YA Dystopia +
Romance. The climax had a good deal of action and drama, but by the end of the
book, I felt a little underwhelmed.
Rita
tells me that the third book is the best of the bunch, that it ties everything
up wonderfully. I'm not entirely sure I'll get to reading the other two books,
though. Maybe if I get them for Christmas...
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