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
