Title: Shatter Me ( Shatter Me #1)
Author: Tahereh Mafi
Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Paranormal, Dystopian, YA
Publisher: Harper Collins
Publication date: October 2012
Paperback: 338 pages
My Rating: ★★★★

BLURB:
I have a curse
I have a gift

I am a monster
I'm more than human

My touch is lethal
My touch is power

I am their weapon
I will fight back

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.

MY REVIEW

It took me a while to get this review written because I had so many thoughts about this book I just couldn’t be coherent about it. I needed to read Destroy Me before continuing the series, and I’m happy I did because now I understand much better Warner’s behavior.

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”


Shatter Me is the first book in a series with the same name by Tahereh Mafi. I was pleasantly surprised by it. What I liked most was the simplicity and the cursiveness of the text. Repetition, short and concise sentences give it a special charm. It is a book that can be read quickly and has no boring passages, everything is moving at an astonishing rate.


“Hope is a pocket of possibility. I'm holding it in my hand.”



The characters are very complex, the world created by the author is very well described. The dystopian trope in YA literature is one of my favorites and this book has risen to my expectations. I was enchanted by Juliet's mind, the way she perceived the world, her "fractured" way of thinking. The obsessive way in which she summarizes everything to a count, her tendency to contradict, the simplistic way of communication she sometimes adopts. She seems to be a fragile girl but appearances can be deceiving, she is much stronger than she thinks. Adam was attentive, patient, he proves that the world can be good, gentle, kind; that regardless of the danger that comes from touching Julliet, she deserves to be loved and accepted. And even so, I just could not connect with him on a deeper level, he is too much of a walking cliche in my opinion. I appreciated that he was holding her, that he was trying to help her, but from there on, a feeling of love seemed to be a long way off.


“I am nothing but novocaine. I am numb, a world of nothing, all feeling and emotion gone forever. I am a whisper that never was.”



Instead, Warner fascinated me from his first appearance. I have a soft spot for villains and after getting to know him better in the short novella I am definitely rooting for him. I liked his sense of irony, his interactions with Juliette - even though he had his own agenda, and she was initially just a pawn on his board. Of the two, he seemed to see Juliette exactly as she is, with good and bad, not censoring her as a person, as everyone in her life did.


His smile is laced with dynamite. "Go to sleep."

"Go to hell."

He works his jaw. Walks to the door. "I'm working on it.


The action was very alert and I like the direction in which the plot is going. The ending was a little predictable, I expected a huge cliffhanger. At some level, it was surprising but not in the way I anticipated.

“Hope in this world bleeds out of the barrel of a gun.”

Shatter Me is a book about finding your inner strength, about the fight for freedom, for love, a story that gives you the courage to go further no matter how hard it may be to reach your goals. I can’t wait to see what happens next in the series.




                                                      
                                              

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