Shatter Me

This book blew me away.

Shatter Me has undertones of dystopian fiction, but it is really its own entity. How do I explain this? Imagine that your favorite paranormal, superhero, and dystopian books were put into a blender to make one single book. That right there? That would be this book.

Now I think it's important I start off with the writing style in Shatter Me because that seems to be the one thing that might keep people from falling in love with this gorgeous book. I'll admit, Tahereh Mafi's writing style is unlike anything I've read before. It's eerily prosaic, wonderfully descriptive, and oddly disconcerting, all at the same time. Replete with strikethroughs and repeated phrases, it feels sometimes like you might be going crazy show more yourself. I think it's important to remember that the reader is inside Juliette's head during the story. This is a girl who hasn't seen another person, hasn't touched another person, for what seems to her to be an endless amount of time. Being in Juliette's head can be off putting, or it can be beautiful. It all depends on how much you allow yourself to be immersed in the girl, and the world, that is built here.

Juliette's character is what really brings Shatter Me to life. Constantly fighting a battle between the madness that she thinks still might consume her, and the giving person Adam knows her to be. Juliette is equal parts strong willed and vulnerable. The knowledge that her power can harm others cripples her, and she constantly wavers between feeling like a monster and a normal girl. Juliette truly has a power that can be used for good or evil, and both opportunities are presented to her. It might sound cliche at first glance, but I assure you that the girl on the pages is anything but that. Juliette's wariness at trusting others, her need to help even if she isn't sure if she should, her constant questioning of herself even when she's fairly sure that she is right, is all the product of her past. Tahereh Mafi builds up a girl who is believable and unique wrapped into one package. Juliette isn't perfect, and I loved her for that.

Shatter Me is definitely dsytopian, and the world that is built around Juliette's story is amazing. Cities crumble to the ground in the wake of The Reestablishment. People cower in doorways as what is left of society is patrolled, and essentially owned, by the soldiers who are loyal to the movement. The explanation as to how this came about hit very close to home for me. To say that this world is possible, well that's an understatement. I won't spoil anything, but I will say that there is a distinct possibility we really could get to that point. It made me ponder that, and that made me fall even further under the spell of this book.

If you can't tell from my musings above, I fell madly in love with this story. Devouring 120 pages in half an hour let me know that I was in for the long haul. I admit that I know that it won't be for everyone. As I mentioned, the writing style is different and might put some people off. However I can honestly say that if you give it a chance, if you allow yourself to fall wholeheartedly into Juliette's world, you might just find a story that will immerse you like it did me. Shatter Me is a refreshingly unique read that I enjoyed thoroughly. If there is indeed a sequel coming, I can't wait! show less

Ah… the beauty!!!

There are 3 major things I love about this book.

The first is the balance on the edge of sanity. Juliette begins with a roll of a mini-book and a tiny pen where she scratches her thoughts. She has no one to talk to, so her thoughts begin as written and even when she is no longer living precariously out of that mini-book, her thoughts follow the pattern of writing to herself in it. She is forever catching her thoughts and correcting them.

Sometimes, she is forcing her will over her emotions... sometimes it is her initial reaction that is virtually insane, but at other times it’s her will-power insisting on an imagined reality that is even more insane. Either way, Mafi has captured a level of emotion and imbalance that show more is exquisite.

As the story progresses and Juliette’s confidence grows, these cross-outs lessen. She doesn’t have to correct herself as often. Except in moments of great emotion… and it’s precious. What she refuses to admit carries more story than the words she allows to live. Not to mention, so much more of Juliette’s character is revealed without any description!

The second thing I love is the use of Numbers.
“I’ve been locked up for 264 days… 1 window. 4 walls. 144 square feet of space. 26 letters in an alphabet I haven’t spoken in 264 days of isolation… 6,336 hours since I’ve touched another human being.” Pg 1
Numbers are emphasized by using the numerical instead of letter form… Juliette divides her life into counting everything around her to keep her grasp on reality. She counts to wait. She counts to make sense of things. She counts to keep her brain ready to think because she also has moments of freezing, where she can’t move and can’t react and those moments frighten her. I loved, LOVED this use of numbers through-out the entire book.

The third thing I loved, but I also squirmed uncomfortably with… there is an awful lot of sexual tension!! Consistent with the power of the first two major themes, Juliette’s senses are so deprived that any TOUCH at all is an exclamation point!!! Experiencing human contact through her deprived point of view was… beyond words. My words, that is, so I’ll quote again:
“His fingertips are 10 points of electricity killing me with something I’ve never known before. Something I’ve always wanted to feel.
‘Then why are you here?’ I whisper, broken, dying in his arms. ‘Why…’ 1, 2 attempts at inhalation. ‘Why are you touching me?’
‘Because I can.’ He almost cracks a smile and I almost sprout a pair of wings.” Pg 117
I loved this incredible dive into emotions, but, but… those shower scenes are… OMG!!! No, there’s no sex, but only because they keep getting interrupted!!

Here's my one tiny complaint: apparently Juliette is any-man’s idea of beautiful ‘cause every one of 'em ogles over her. Since this is opposite of her childhood memories, it leapt out at me as beyond-believable. That EVERY man would suddenly desire her beyond their physical control was a little excessive for me. Adam makes complete sense… they have deep long-bonding connections that ooze believability. Warner also makes sense in a sick, twisted way.

Warner, btw, is a great hate-able, detestable character and that hint of attraction between him and Juliette is extra creepy, but totally believable.

It’s just… every other man that saw her flipped over in awe of her seemed far-fetched ‘cause… frankly… if she was THAT hot, she couldn’t be THAT innocent at the same time. You know? She’d have that cocky self-assurance that natural beauty slathers it’s bearers with. So she’s either one or the other… but both? End of teensy-weensy complaint.

I’ve found one more thing I love about this book, now, which makes four:
“He closes his eyes for half of a second and I marvel at the drop drop drops of hot water caught in his eyelashes like pearls forged from pain.” Pg 117
“Killing time isn’t as difficult as it sounds. I can shoot a hundred numbers through the chest and watch them bleed decimal points in the palm of my hand. I can rip the numbers off a clock and watch the hour hand tick tick tick its final tock just before I fall asleep. I can suffocate seconds just by holding my breath. I’ve been murdering minutes for hours and no one seems to mind.” Pg 127
The writing behind everything… behind the numbers and the edge of sanity and the sensual tension… is incredible. It’s picturesque, unexpected and sharply graphic. I don’t know how many times my heart pounded and I stopped reading and just soaked up an odd phrase here or there, reading it over and over again wondering how Mafi ever thought to put those words together in that combination? She took a busy storyline filled with complicated characters and spilled it out her own unique way.

You know when you love a book so much you have to read the Acknowledgements section? This thank you to her editor made sense:
“It’s been such a privilege working with someone who so absolutely understands my story. My characters are safe with you in a way they wouldn’t have been anywhere else and I still can’t believe I got so lucky.”
Actually… I can’t believe we all got so lucky!! This book could have been edited to pieces, stuffed full of punctuation and strict rules about how numbers are handled in books, not to mention No Crossing Out when it’s Thoughts and not even Journal Entries!! This book is a work of art from the writer all the way through the publishing industry… and I really love it.

NOTE: At the book signing, Tahereh clarified that her agent loved the book in it's entirety, strike-through's and all, so there was never any scary looming publishing bullies to fight off. I was just letting my imagination go crazy in my own little world. Weird.

Cover Commentary: What's with the dress?! I'm just curious... it's not even the shimmery one with the pockets or the too-tight one that's hard to run in. I was (happily) caught off guard when the story inside did not match that cover. The blips are right-on... but based on the cover, I thought some super-human girl in formal wear was going to storm the town.

My Rating: 5 stars - Love it!! I love this book, I want to quote this book, reread this book... I want to follow the author around so I can listen to her quirky humor. Oh, I don't have to!! She makes vlogs!! Phew! That would be creepy! show less

I've read some criticism about the trend in YA publishing of putting white girls in dresses on book covers regardless of what the story is actually about. This is one of those times that I believe the book cover matches the book absolutely perfectly.

Let me explain.

The cover of Shatter Me is a smooth glossy sheet, shiny and reflective. It caught my eye immediately upon entering the young adult section of the book store, and it caught my eye again at my local library. There's a girl in a white dress on the cover, gorgeous and model-thin, the epitome of our society's beauty standards. Sparks shoot out behind her in the background. It's quite an attractive image, but there's not much behind it. This cover, like so many over covers of YA show more books, only conveys the message that it's another YA book whose main character is a girl, and the plotline involves romance. It doesn't tell us much else, and certainly not anything about the particular storyline in the book itself. In other words, it's all glitz and glamour on the surface, but no real substance.

That's exactly what Tahereh Mafi's writing is like. She uses a lot of pretty words and flowery descriptions, a lot of metaphors involving birds, sunshine, flowers, rain, drowning... it sounds like it should be beautiful. It isn't. It's complete drivel. Most of the metaphors and descriptive imagery she uses are either cliches, the most obvious of which is the recurring bird image, an overused symbol for freedom/captivity, or they do not make any sense. For example:

"Hate looks like everybody else until it smiles. Until it spins around and lies with lips and teeth carved into semblance of something too passive to punch." What does this even mean? I feel like Mafi did not so much write as simply string a bunch of random words together, hoping that if she chose words that were pretty/interesting/cool enough, people will assume it's super deep and meaningful. If she, in fact, did intend some kind of meaning in this particular sentence, then she failed at conveying it since I can make neither heads nor tails of it.

The metaphors that aren't nonsensical are so exaggerated that it makes her main character and the entire book look like an exercise in melodrama. For example:

"There are 400 cotton balls caught in my windpipe."

"My mouth is sitting on my kneecaps."

"He says it with a small smile the size of Jupiter."

Sure, you can make an (albeit rather poor) argument that teenagers are overly dramatic, but when the whole book is filled with so much exaggeration, it tends to lose its effect. When everything is made into such a big deal and blown out-of-proportion, then it all becomes a wash, since there aren't any smaller things to compare it to. If everything is so big and shocking, then nothing is big and shocking, etc. All the metaphors and imagery lose their meaning. The words themselves appear lovely, but they don't seem to say much of anything. Style, but no substance.

Now, I will say that there are times when Mafi gets it right. Among all the horrific metaphors, I did occasionally come across lines that I thought were genuinely well-written, for example: "Out atmosphere has little to boast of, but after so many months in a concrete corner even the wasted oxygen of our dying Earth tastes like heaven. I can't inhale fast enough." I do think Mafi has some potential, but it'll take a lot of editing and a lot of practice for her to get a firm hold on her writing craft. Unfortunately, I think all the hype and 5-star reviews surrounding this book will only encourage her to keep going with her current style.

But if you can get past the prose (and I'll admit here that I did eventually get used to Mafi's writing style, although I still think it is godawful), you will get to the actual storyline. I said before that no details of the plot of this book are evident on the cover, but the cover does give us a clue. The image of a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress is commonly found covering YA books with a romance storyline (often a love triangle) set against the backdrop of a paranormal or dystopian world (the details of which are often sketchily developed), and always uses the "our love is so forbidden/us against the world" cliches. These kinds of covers rarely tell us anything about the actual storyline, just that the elements I listed are involved.

Shatter Me is no different. Like its cover, the book's plot revolves around Juliette, a girl with a special power (a killing touch) who has been captured by an evil leader. The whole thing takes place in a rundown dystopian society. Very few details are given about just what exactly the world she lives in is like, aside from the most typical things like an oppressive government and environmental problems. The worldbuilding takes up maybe 10 pages maximum, and that's it. The rest of the story revolves around the girl's meeting and subsequent cliche-ridden romance with a handsome boy, who is conveniently the only one who is not hurt by her power and is also her captor's lackey, so of course, their romance is forbidden. They fall in love and then run off together in typical "you and me against the world" fashion, and eventually join a rebellious group. That's about it.

In addition to weak writing skills, it seems that Mafi also lacks imagination. Shatter Me was a cliche forbidden love/evil dystopian society story. And the worst part is, so much of the book is taken up by awful metaphors that Mafi has not even bothered to develop her dystopian setting or flesh out her characters. This book is more like the bare skeleton of a book. It uses a large typeface with generous spacing, so despite being 338 pages long, once you take away the overwrought metaphors and pointless flowery language, the actual storyline covers maybe 150 pages. That is not a lot.

So, going back to my original point, the cover of this book matches it perfectly, because it conveys all the glossy attractiveness of the words, but there's really not much content-wise. You don't even really need to read this book. Just stare at the shiny cover and you'll get pretty much the same experience. show less

Shatter Me shattered me

Tahereh Mafi writes like words drip from her tongue onto paper, fully formed and imbued with the essence of an emotion. I had the hardest time not highlighting everything in the book.

Shatter Me is set in a Dystopian landscape, which I noticed only peripherally, because I found myself awaiting the next twisted plot turn, each thought Juliette would whisper and to remember to breathe.

This book is an astonishing cross between prose that becomes poetry and the kind of thriller that you can't turn the pages fast enough. I couldn't wait for the next word, much less, the next scene.

Emotionally exhausting, yet adrenaline charged, Shatter Me starts at the lowest low and, like an active seismograph, goes up and down so many show more times, when you arrive at the end, you won't be sure it's over. And it isn't... Five Stars in my book! show less

Shatter Me is Tahereh Mafi’s debut novel, the first book in a dystopian trilogy. While a crumbling world factors into the story in a big way, Shatter Me builds on that premise with paranormal elements. It is just such an addition—the combination of those elements—that adds depth and dimension to the story.

Shatter Me is the tale of 17-year-old Juliette. She’s been locked away in a prison of sorts, separated from society, shunned by family—she’s never had any friends—and all because she killed someone by accident. She was just trying to be helpful, but to do that she had to touch someone—and her touch is deadly. When you’ve been locked away in solitary confinement for months, not speaking a word, it’s a shock to get show more company, especially when it’s a stunning boy—but this boy, Adam, has secrets of his own.

Juliette finds herself an object of desire. It becomes a battle of wits between Adam, her savior, and Warner, her jailor. And they’re not the only ones that want Juliette. The Reestablishment, the new society, wants her as a weapon, as does the opposition. Juliette has been an outcast all her life. Life is about to change in ways she could never have imagined.

This novel sucks you in right away. It doesn’t waste a moment giving you dry backstory, but takes you right to the start of the action: Juliette locked away. The scenario begs for an explanation, but you don’t get that right away and that’s okay because the journey to find that answer is filled with such intricate worldbuilding, the reader remains fully engaged.

The device used to convey Juliette’s inner thoughts is unusual. It consists of strikeouts of the words. This was initially annoying and can pull the reader out of the story, but over time one gets used to it. It becomes a convenient way to grasp the true nature of her feelings and show the volatility of the same.
The author has a fresh grasp of language that was evidenced through her original turns of phrase. It is a pleasure to reread and ruminate over them.

Shatter Me is intriguing. Imbued with mystery, romance, high-stakes action, and paranormal adventure, Shatter Me captures the reader from page one. The conclusion was particularly well done, setting the stage for the next installment in this compelling trilogy. show less

Here is another one of those books I don't know why it took me so long to read. I loved it. Love the concept. Love the story. Love the characters. As for the style of writing, by the end of the book I decide I actually really like it. I can honestly say it was interesting and refreshing.

Juliette Ferrars cannot be touched without causing bodily harm and in some cases death. She grew up without the love, and support from her parents and was ostracized at school. At the age of 14 she was put in an asylum that's more like a prison. She has no one to talk to and thinks of herself as a monster. But with all these experiences in Juliette's life she is strong and has an unbroken spirit. I love Juliette, she's so brave, she stands up for show more herself and is not afraid to speak her mind. Her interactions with Warner were the most fun for me, I was always afraid for her but loved that she told him what she thinks of him without fear.

It's normally not necessary for me to have non-literary books with imagery and prose. Especially para-normal, sci-fi types, I don't believe those genres always need it. Shatter me being dystopia and sci-fi themed would have probably been fine without all the creative and imagery writing; but with the theme of the story it really helped to show the turmoil Juliette has held inside her all her life. To me the style of writing used showed Juliette's way of dealing, she didn't get to speak out loud much to anyone even before the asylum, and was probably mostly in her own head all the time. I think some of the things she thinks is things she wants to forget, take back, afraid to say, or wish for. Juliette used to read a lot and writes in a book to not forget words, I think she loves words, and life and nature and her thoughts show that in the writing style used.

I love Adam, he's a sweetheart and he's really good for Juliette and brings something she's been needing all her life. Can't wait to see what he learns about himself from the Omega Point (A rebel organization).

Warner confused me, mostly my thoughts and feelings about him. It's clear he's a dangerous guy, but he was so charming and sweet at times, I have to snap myself out of incoming swoons. He's really scary but some of things he did for Juliette when she first arrived at his headquarters I believe did help to keep her safe.

With well thought out characters, and captivating writing, Shatter Me has set itself up to be a very compelling series. Shatter me was a beautiful story all on it's own, I was drawn in immediately and was riveted to the pages. It was sad at parts, made me angry (for what Juliette had to experience), made me tense, made me relax, but most of all it made me smile. show less

I hereby charge this book with multiple counts of excessively yearny writing.

Exhibit A: “The possibility of losing him is 100 years of solitude I don’t want to imagine. I don’t want my arms to be devoid of his warmth. His touch. His lips, God his lips, his mouth on my neck, his body wrapped around mine, holding me together as if to affirm that my existence on this earth is not for nothing.

Exhibit B: “...I’m licked by a million flames of wanting so desperate I can hardly inhale. He’s a hot bath, a short breath, 5 days of summer pressed into 5 fingers writing stories on my body. I’m an embarrassment of nerves crashing into him, controlled by one current of electricity coursing through my core. His scent is assaulting my show more senses.”

I can tell you that there is a lot more being assaulted than her senses.

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I maintain that whilst an excellent premise, this wanton overuse of cheesy writing leaves us in no doubt of this book warranting these charges. I think my case will be strengthened by the fact that Exhibit A and Exhibit B are within a couple of pages of each other. Need I say more people.

I rest my case.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I’m here to plead for a lenient sentence in what we can all acknowledge is a gross breach of the Anti Yearny Writing Bill. However, I think that there are enough positives in this book to warrant a lighter sentence. The futuristic world, whilst scant on detail, is very intriguing. For goodness sake members of the jury there are people with cool super powers! Please take these into consideration when making your final judgement.

We the jury find the book guilty but given the positive aspects we sentence it to 2 Stars. show less