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Monday, April 8, 2013

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Everyone has managed to keep Shatter Me pretty much under wraps and I am certainly not going to be the one to spoil it, so in lieu of my usual composed synopsis, I'm going to go with the publisher's description here:

"You can't touch me," I whisper.

I'm lying, is what I don't tell him.

He can touch me, is what I'll never tell him.

But things happen when people touch me.

Strange things.

Bad things.

No one knows why Juliette's touch is fatal, but The Reestablishment has plans for her. Plans to use her as a weapon.

But Juliette has plans of her own.

After a lifetime without freedom, she's finally discovering a strength to fight back for the very first time—and to find a future with the one boy she thought she'd lost forever.

So you know when everyone is talking about a book (or a movie or a show) and you come to expect it to be so completely amazing that it can't possibly live up to those serious expectations. Yeah. That was my unfortunate experience with Tahereh Mafi's massively buzzed about debut, Shatter Me. I did enjoy it quite a bit. I simply wish that I'd been able to go into it without any kind of expectations at all. I didn't go gaga over it - and I'd definitely expected that I would.

Mafi does some really cool things with this book. First, the story is told completely from Juliette's perspective and in first person. The sort of inner monologue with the scratched out text was an element I particularly enjoyed. I know some readers have said they found this distracting but I thought it was neat. Her prose has something of a stream of consciousness thing going on (though not quite as weird or rambly as I've seem stream of consciousness get).

I liked Juliette. I loved the world. I'm intrigued by where Mafi will take the story next.

Shatter Me is a futuristic dystopian read that starts in one place and ends up in a very unexpected and surprisingly completely different place. That's about all I'm going to say until I have a chance to read and review the follow up, Unravel Me

2 comments:

Christina said...

I'm going to be reading this very soon, but my expectations are low. I'm curious about it, but I suspect Juliette will make me crazy. Who knows, though. Glad you liked it, even if it wasn't what hype lead you to expect.

Becky LeJeune said...

I would have been so much better off with this one if I'd read it when I first got my hands on it. It's always nice when something does live up to the hype but most of the time I'd rather be able to read the books without being aware of all the talk surrounding a title.