Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Release Date: 15th November, 2011

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 346pgs

The Story

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.

The Review

For those who know me well enough, I'm a comic book nerd. Like many other reviewers of this book, we will always make comparisons with this book to the ultimate classic and one of my favourite comic books of all time, X-men, and that's not such a bad thing in this case. After all, X-men is awesome, and secondly, SHATTER ME stands all on its own as an almost-new and thrilling adventure for young adult readers, and it's a fantastic way to start a trilogy. And while there's plenty of great things to say about this first installment and so many ways to express them, but the honest truth is that it's hard to put them into words. Honestly.

In a dystopian society beyond the unimaginable, there we meet the beautiful Juliette. Our main heroine's voice, Juliette, is someone that really gets to you on a personal level and immediately you have sympathy for the young girl. She's vulernable. She's at a loss. She's lonely. She's passionate in ways 'us' humans are not. And she has the touch that can kill. Literally. With her world decimated by poverty and disease, for the last three years Juliette has been an outcast and often labelled as a freak. The only comfort she has had in the last 264 days is the company of her caged cell. But then enters Adam.

The thing I loved most about this book was the characters themselves. Forget the supernatural elements. Forget the dystopian worlds. Forget the government-like operations. Let's start with the main character, Juliette. For me I found Juliette's character completely believable and realistic in every sense. Being locked away - alone and uncared for - it's no wonder why she's at a point of being broken and you too yearn for her want to see the birds fly across the sky and feel the touch of another human being without killing them. What the author paid close attention to was the feelings themselves and what they can eventually do to a person, and that is what made this book incredible for a debut novel. Juliette in this case was the character was who made to feel weak and unwanted but as soon as she connects with Adam, everything changes to make her into a stronger person and ultimately decide to stand up for herself. Which I loved about her.

For the love interest of this amazing story, here we have Adam. The boy with a lot of swoon and so much heart to make the EPIC swoon of all swoons. Adam is Juliette's unwanted cellmate but he soon becomes everything she was looking for - someone who wants to understand her rather than runaway from. Oh Adam. Oh Adam. Like so many other bloggers I've talked to in regards to this book, this one guy has stolen our hearts within a second. Okay I admit, when I was first introduced to his character, I was yelling in my mind, "Who do you think you are, Mister?" He was a little rude in the beginning. But once you learn more about him including his background later in the novel and begin to see his emotional attachment to our dear Juliette, I was then repeating along the lines of, "Why are you so . . . cheesy-but-so-romantic-in-a-way-that-makes-me-question-why-you're-so-hot-all-the-time?" Yeah you get the picture. Anyway with exchanged dialogue exploding with heated chemistry between Juliette and Adam, readers can trust me when I say there's a lot of sexy times in this book despite some grim circumstances. And then there's this guy named Kenji who was super funny and whom I loved also, and there was of course a bad guy, Warner, who is hot and evil at the same time, but I won't get into too much detail about him because Adam is more worthy of this paragraph than he is.

Overall the story is brilliantly written with a very entertaining cast of characters, along with an truly amazing heroine to drive the story in the right direction. Without too many flaws, the only real problem I had with the book - the reason why I'm giving this one 4 1/2 stars instead of the 5 golden stars it deserved - was the ending itself which I felt ruined the exciting feelings I'd gotten from the action and heart-pounding sequences leading toward the end. But that didn't stop me in loving this book. If you have a love of X-men like I do or perhaps want a book crossed between Hunger Games meets X-men, or you're simply looking for something beyond the usual paranormal trend, then be sure to read SHATTER ME. You won't regret it!

The Rating

4 1/2 / 5 stars