Oh well, hello friends! I am back with a book review again today! This week’s review is from Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi. A book that I have been keeping on my “one day I will read you” list but have never done so. I am glad that I’ve finally read this and understood all the hype going about the book! 💁🏻♀️
Let’s go into the review, shall we?
Shatter Me has very mixed reviews on Goodreads and while I understand each side (one side hates this book and the other is a die-hard fan) I think I enjoyed this quite a lot regarding the issues I saw so I didn’t even think twice to give four stars to it. Bookstagram is currently going mad over one of the characters in the series, Warner. Maybe the edits persuaded me to read it this early, or maybe it was the hype of my friends but here we are, reading a young adult romance/dystopia and enjoying it although I thought I was too old for it.
The world is destructed, the birds do not fly and the corps do not grow, everything has been under the control of the Reestablishment, an organization to save the very world they live in. Build something new from the ruins. Clean the air, grow crops, feed the animals and protect humankind. However not everything goes well in the journey, the organization quickly becomes a figure of dictatorship, trying to “save” the world by destroying every last piece of the old civilization. It is not something new for us, the good old dystopia readers, we are used to seeing organizations go wild. Reestablishment is no different, though we do not get a very good inside of the organization yet, we can guess what they are trying to do. Our main character, Juliette, is a girl who has been locked up for the past three years somewhere she doesn’t know. She has been given by her family, she is different, she is unique, she is somewhat…. Dangerous.
Juliette has the power of a lethal thought, whoever touches her ends up dead or highly injured, and she has the ability to take life off of them with a touch. This is why she has been locked up in a cell for years, and this is why we hear her inner thoughts at the beginning of the book that often. She is alone. She hasn’t talked to anybody in years and she is just… confused. Confused because all she ever did was be nice to everyone. She has been living in fear and she was finally locked up because she had done something bad. It was an accident since she had done everything to stay away from people, it was nothing but an accident but that unfortunately didn’t stop authorities from taking her in.
Then we meet the male protagonist of the first book; Adam. He comes as her cellmate but eventually, we learn that he is a soldier. A soldier is on the other side of the right. Then we meet the obsessed villain, Warner. The authority of an entire section and he is going crazy over Juliette. In the book, at least in the first one; we do not get a good insight into Warner. We just know that he is in love with her in all his twisted ways but my gut tells me that he actually has some other reason and that reason is not the same reason everyone else says. For me, he has something up in his sleeve and we will see what that is in the upcoming books. I do not want to give too much detail mainly because I do not want to ruin the book for my readers. 💖
The characters of this book were decent to me. It did bother me that everything happened as if the author was in rush, however for the first book, I will not talk too much about it. Juliette was disoriented, and confused, and had a hard time trusting and considering her consequences and her “gift”, it seemed completely normal for a 17-year-old to feel that way. Adam is incredibly kind, though I hate that the cliché “I’ve loved you for so long” was everywhere in the book I know that our lethal girl will end up with the freak, so I didn’t care that much. Warner was portrayed quite well as a morally-grey character, the way he was obsessed with Juliette and the way he was so sure himself, it was delightful in every possible way. Of course, when I consider the book as a dystopia, it was weak because the only glimpse of the world we got came from Juliette who has been locked up for years and is hella confused. However for a start, it was OK, I am sure that Mafi will build it better as the series goes on.
Overall, I am glad that I read it! I cannot wait to continue the series! I will hopefully finish the entire series this year because I cannot handle the type on bookstagram anymore. Did you read the series? Let me know!
See you in my next post! ✨❤️
Luster of Books 