Thursday, April 19, 2012

Review: SHATTER ME by Tahereh Mafi


SHATTER ME
by Tahereh Mafi
Hardcover
, 352 pages
Published November 15th 2011 by Harper/HarperCollins

Placement in the Pile: Reaching New Heights (ALMOST top picks)

Summary:
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.

Review:

I really enjoyed this book. I thought Juliette's voice was spot on for someone who had lived her life basically untouched, and who suffered the lack of love in her past. She was on the border of crazy, and yet she made the most sense of all of the characters in the novel. The world was crazy.

At first I wasn't sure about the crossed out words. But in the end I thought it was a super unique writing style that gave you insight to the way we all not only edit what we say, but we edit our thoughts. It made Juliette even MORE real for me.

And I really connected to the romantic storyline, and her struggle to become free.

That all being said, the end was kind of a disappointment for me. All of a sudden this really unique girl in this dystopian world turned into a girl that's just one of many in a sci-fi world and gives us no closure at all.

However it's worth reading. It's a great book, and I'll try the second to see where it's going, even though it's going to be a totally different book to me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I loved Shatter Me, and glad you like it, too. Great review, and I agree about the crossed out words. I was like: HUH? WHAT? At fist, but they grew on me.

The Insouciant Sophisticate said...

It's interesting to read your thoughts about the end because I had the opposite reaction. I wasn't really feeling the romance but I perked up since the X-Men comparisons I had seen started making sense.