Shatter Me (Shatter Me #1) by Tahereh Mafi
“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
Juliette’s touch hurts people, and she is locked up for it. It’s been 264 days that she has been locked up until she receives a new cell mate. And it’s a boy.
The Story
The way this is written starts off like it should be out of a journal with all the scratched out lines. This got ridiculously old. A good half of the book was spent basically determining whether or not the narrator is crazy.
And really I think she is. This girl went on and on in excessive hyperbole, similes, and metaphors. I am not joking. So much of the book is spent going on and on about how people can’t touch her and how screwy the world is – but only in such a poetic way that I would expect from an 8th grader listening to My Chemical Romance.
After spending quite a bit of time too much time in a crazy person cell, we get out, only to basically meet another key character and learn that two boys are essentially obsessed with this girl. This had such an absurd love triangle. And the best worst part was that she was so deprived of peoples touch that we got to spend a lot of hyperbole-infused-metaphorical romantic scenes where she drones on and on about the touch of skin and lips.
I just hated this book from the very, very start. And the only thing that really got me through was the thought that maybe it gets better and the fact that it was a buddy read with Rae and Ashlynn. The ending is so drastically different from the beginning, that I have no idea what to expect for the next book, but not to worry because I won’t be reading it. It goes from crazy chick in a cell to dystopian x-men
The World Building
Doesn’t happen until the last 90%. No really, like I said, we spend so much time expressing the hatred of her “gift” and how dreamy Adam is and how much she want’s to touch him that we have no idea really what the Reestablishment is. We get that it’s dystopian…very 1984 meets “magical powers”.
The Characters
I just can’t even describe the people in this book. Juliette is bat shit crazy and desperate for people to touch her that even though she is in perilous danger she can barely keep her clothes on (albeit, everything is strictly PG13). Adam is sort of creepy, like here’s this girl that he is in love obsessed with because she was actually nice to people despite how they treated her in elementary school. Warner, is DEFINITELY creepy with his possessiveness and coming on to her.
The Soundtrack
Walter Meego – Keyhole
