SHATTER ME- TAHEREH MAFI

TITLE: SHATTER ME

AUTHOR: TAHEREH MAFI

SERIES:  SHATTER ME #1

RATING: ★★★★

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.

REVIEW:

Do you guys love X-MEN? I am asking this because this dystopian book just turned out to be somewhat like the x-men...With all those powers, and how to control them and the same old…SAVE THE WORLD.

I have mixed opinions about this book. I don’t hate it neither do I love it…its somewhere in the middle.

So the story starts with our world in future getting shattered with people dying and the population of earth declining due to diseases, lack of food , and the change of the atmospheric condition..Where the ozone layer is deteriorating and the clouds seem to be of a different color.

Our female protagonist Juliette is locked up in a prison for the last 264 days. It is because she has a lethal and toxic touch, a touch that can kill people. So she is locked up because she did kill a person by mistake. Locked up in prison, she gets a new cellmate Adam. Who happens to be her childhood acquaintance.

The Reestablishment are the people who are in charge of this whole new world and they promise to bring humanity from the edge of starvation and downfall. But the problem arises when you know that they lock up Juliette not for the safety of people but instead to torture others with Juliette as a weapon.

The writing was really interesting. I liked how the author made the use of strike out words; it was refreshing to read something like that. We come to know what’s inside Juliette’s head and that make this whole experience of reading really personal and real because we even know what is going on in her subconscious mind. One thing I didn’t like about the writing is the use of unnecessary lines and metaphors some of which are baseless and I didn't even understand what they mean. 

His gaze is fixed on me: calm, unflappable; 2 buckets of river water at midnight.  I’d like to cry into his eyes.”

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.”

There are so many more lines like that.( understand what i mean)

The characters of the book:

Juliette: she is the main female lead protagonist. she is troubled ..yes I mean lock me up in a cell for 264 days ..And I would be more troubled then her.

She is not like troubled in the sense that she has a mental problem or something, she just thinks that she is monster that she should just be killed and there is nothing good about her. And she thinks all these not only because she is locked up in prison but also because she never was close to humanity, she didn't have friends, her parents sent her away...She never touched anyone and when she did it killed him. Still she comes across as someone very patient and brave.

Adam: Adam is the sweet guy. At the beginning I felt he was the bad one but he had reasons to behave that way… ok NO SPOILERS. OK so there is a bit of insta-love aspect but not really because Adam and Juliette have known each other from a long time, even though they did not talk. He is caring, sweet but somehow I am not so into him as a character he seems too predictable, and too perfect.

Warner: This guy was my favorite character of the book. Warner is the son of the leader of the reestablishment. He is creepy and there is very suspense element that I get every time I read about him. His comments and conversations are really fun and twisted and not cliché and this made me like him as a character more and I wanted to learn more of him and his past.

He is very obsessed with Juliette; at times I am confused if he likes her or her power.

 I seriously like..SERIOUSLY…Want to see how his relationship with Juliette turns out to be.

There is a great deal of romance and also a love triangle, which I think would be further more developed in the second book…so for all the dystopian fans who liked action more than romance …WARNING.. this book has a lot of romance, it has equal share of action but I think that the story line is more inclined to romance and so is our female lead…

It was a good book and I loved how Juliette as a character grew and she finally understood that she has a gift and not a curse and she left behind her insecurities and began to think that she is not a monster and that she deserves friends, love and human connections.

Everything was good until the ending…when I got the whole deal of X-MEN zest to it..i seriously hope the sequel doesn’t turn out to be in some super hero format..

Overall it was a good read, I would definitely check out the sequel because I am pretty curious as to what happens next…..

♥♥♥

“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.” 

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.” 
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me