Review: Shatter Me

Author: Tahereh Mafi
Release Date: November 15, 2011
Publisher: Harper
Pages: 338
Series: Shatter Me #1
Source: Purchased
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Summary: 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.

My Favorite Lines:

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.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.”

“My face is in his hands and my lips are at his lips and he's kissing me and I'm oxygen and he's dying to breathe.” 

 Why I Loved It:  I wasn't expecting to like love this book.  The cover is gorgeous breathtakingly beautiful, but I had a hard time getting into the writing style.  Let me give an example of the style I speak of:

“What are you writing?” Cellmate speaks again.

These words are vomit.

This shaky pen is my esophagus.

This sheet of paper is my porcelain bowl.

It was different and strange and really worked for me.  It just took me some chapters to adjust and appreciate.  Juliette is an incredibly well created character.  The style created who she was, naive and confused and emotionally lost.  She has spent her life never being able to touch someone without causing them enormous pain.  That's a hard existence to live.  It isn't until she meets Adam, a boy who is immune to her touch, that her world changes.  Even still, Juliette harnesses a great power which is normally craved by ambitious people.  Juliette will have to fight to avoid being a pawn in a world full of destruction.

Ms. Mafi has such a unique style that worked so well.  The writing is choppy and messy and filled with complete honestly and lies.  The world around Juliette has the bleak landscape of many dystopian novels, but it managed to hold it's own and maintain a uniqueness.  My ARC of Unravel Me is dying to be read.

The book is a mixture of fantasy and romance with a hint of my beloved X-Men style of sci-fy.  It was an incredible read, and one I recommend to those who enjoy fantasy.