Shatter Me (Shatter Me #1) by Tahereh Mafi Review

Title: Shatter Me

Author: Tahereh Mafi

Hardcover, 338 pages

Published November 15th 2011 by Harper/HarperCollins
Source: Personal Collection

Plot:

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.

In this electrifying debut, Tahereh Mafi presents a world as riveting as The Hunger Games and a superhero story as thrilling as The X-Men. Full of pulse-pounding romance, intoxicating villainy, and high-stakes choices, Shatter Me is a fresh and original dystopian novel—with a paranormal twist—that will leave readers anxiously awaiting its sequel.

My Thoughts:

This novel took me a while to get into it. I would say I struggled through the first 60-90 pages to find the flow of the book and whether I was going to like it or not. I’m glad I stuck with it, because once Warner came into the picture, things really took off for me.

The writing style is very different. It’s not like any other book I’ve ever read, which totally makes it stand out amongst the sea of YA novels out there. And the plot line is strange. Strange in a sense that you don’t really know what’s going on. Which is good. I like to be surprised. The plot just kept twisting and dragging me further and further into the story.

The only thing I would say I didn’t like about the novel was the quick emotional changes of the characters. Love just felt so rushed. I couldn’t see how this love triangle developed so quickly. I know that the MC and Adam have a past, but it was just a little hard for me to buy into a quick love story. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and even at that they never really spoke to each other before they are reintroduced in the current time frame of the novel.  But other than that I loved the book. The action was spot on and I enjoyed watching the MC morph into a strong female lead.

I recommend this novel to any YA Dystopian lovers!