“Find me a cure for these tears, I’d really like to exhale for the first time in my life.”
Synopsis : 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. . . 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 . . . Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.
I didn’t really know what to expect going into this novel, I was aware of all the hype, but I wondered what kind of story could be told about a girl with a deadly touch. From the first chapter the reader is thrown into Juliette’s isolated imprisonment, but when she gets a new roommate she soon finds herself running for her life in a world on the brink of destruction.
The characters in Shatter Me were pretty spot on. You have the The Girl, The redeeming himself Hero, Funny Sidekick and The Villian. Mafi writes a compelling villain. I found Warner to be very unique from the usual nameless and faceless dystopian villains. I just kept thinking “OMG, he is super creepy”.
I liked the structure of Shatter Me and the way Adam and Juliette’s past are weaved into the present. However, The writing of Juliette in the novel has a tendency to be flourished with something close to purple prose. Mafi uses this writing style as apart of Juliette’s character. However, for me, it started to become a little grating and hard for me to take seriously. For example
“Hate looks just like everybody else until it smiles. Until it spins around and lies with lips and teeth carved into the semblance of something too passive to punch”
Yes, this novel does have a superhero-vibe to especially towards the end, and I think the pacing was just right for it. Shatter Me would make a great graphic novel. It relies heavily on visuals and action scenes. It will be interesting to see how this series works to set itself apart from this superhero movie comparison if it even does at all.
In the end, This novel felt more to me like a prequel or origins story, I just wanted there to be a little bit more story and less like “this is how I came to be”. It’s one of the few novels that I think has the potential to be serialized very well.
I really enjoyed this book and can’t wait for the next one. Can I at least get a title ?!?
1/2 of the blogging duo at Books and Sensibility, I have been blogging about and reviewing books since 2011. I read any and every genre, here on the blog I mostly review Fantasy, Adult Fiction, and Young Adult with a focus on audiobooks.