Shatter Me

By: Tahereh Mafi

*edit- Hey guys, this is future Aaradhyaa. Um, this rant is long. Just saying. And it might take a while to figure what exactly I’m trying to say, but this is what Shatter Me was like.*

I have a curse
I have a gift

I am a monster
I’m more than human

My touch is lethal
My touch is power

I am their weapon
I will fight back

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.

“Shatter Me” was like my first attempt at cooking  over-done. It was like climbing Mount Everest  tiring, hearing a kid screaming in the hallway while taking a test distracting, and my dog throwing his bone at me silly. 

At some point, I was drowning, desperately searching for an island overwhelmed by the prose and eager for the story. And don’t get me started about the crossing out of passages in the book. It was irritating,annoyingstupid cheap trick dumb, something I did not enjoy. 

When I hold a professionally published, FINISHED copy of a mass-produced book and it contains strikeouts, sentences starting in lowercase letters, and numbers one through ten incorrectly placed in number form, e.g., “Juliette has 2 hands and 0 1 brain,” my inner grammar maven’s brain is screaming, making it impossible for me to focus!

I mean, I GET that this was all a stylistic choice, etc. That the all over the place, shit terrible sentence structure was supposed to reflect Juliette’s instability, or whatever the heck it was supposed to reflect, but I just can’t get behind starting a sentence with “4,” my friends.

————————————————————————————————————————

I heard the book was pretty good. I enjoyed maybe forty percent of it before it all went downhill, but… um… it really, really went downhill. 

I do not like to think about eyeballs. They just exist. I don’t want to look at them. I hate this cover. But the one with the girl on it is even worse.

But that’s irrelevant. The hideous covers are irrelevant. ‘Don’t judge a book by it’s cover’ right? But… is that Adam’s eye? Because the only thing I took from this is that Adam’s eyes are blue blue blue blue cobalt blossoming bruise clear as the midnight sky blue. 

Dark blue eyes dark brown hair sharp jawline strong lean frame.

His eyes are the perfect shade of cobalt, blue like a blossoming bruise, clear and deep and decided.

I’ve tried so hard to get those blue blue blue eyes out of my head but I know him I know him I know him. 

…blue and bottomless…

I’d recognize your eyes anywhere in the world. 

He still has the most unusually blue eyes I’ve ever seen. 

…the deep dark blue of the eyes I’ve learned to swim in.

His natural tan offsets a pair of eyes a shade of blue in a midnight sky.

*cough*

*cricket’s chirping*

Um. I don’t need a million descriptions of how blue his eyes are. All I need to know is what color. One time. That’s it! Also the long metaphors? Why? Just. Why?

“Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat.


I wonder about how [raindrops are] always falling down, forgetting their parachutes as they tumble out of the sky toward an uncertain end. It’s like someone is emptying their pockets over the earth and doesn’t seem to care where the contents fall, doesn’t seem to care that the raindrops burst when they hit the ground, that they shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors. I am a raindrop.”

Ok?…

These words are vomit. This shaky pen is my esophagus. This sheet of paper is my porcelain bowl.

TMI. I did not need to know that, girl.

1 word, 2 lips, 3 4 5 fingers form 1 first.
1 corner, 2 parents, 3 4 5 reasons to hide. 
1 child, 2 eyes, 3 4 17 years of fear. 

Makes no sense at all.

I wish I could stuff my mouth full of raindrops and fill my pockets full of snow. I wish I could trace the veins in a falling leaf and feel the wind pinch my nose.

Um.

I can shoot a hundred numbers through the chest and watch them bleed decimal points in the palm of my hand. I can rip the numbers off a clock and watch the hour hand tick tick tick its final tock just before I fall asleep. I can suffocate seconds just by holding my breath. I’ve been murdering minutes for hours and no one seems to mind. 

I don’t understand. Why is she talking about numbers? I’m very bad at focusing. And to read this book, a key resource is focus.

His lips are spelling secrets and my ears are spilling ink, staining my skin with his stories. 


My lungs are sawing my rib cage in half, but I force them to process oxygen anyway. 


I take a few bites of oxygen. 

Since when do you eat oxygen?

My face has been slapped by a hundred hands.

Yes. All hundred hands are mine (metaphorically of course).

Here’s a normal sentence:
“I walk down the cold hall.”

Now make it as awkward and traumatizing as possible:
“I walk down the hall, the linoleum as cold as the corpses of the women and children they’ve killed, and my spine conducts enough electricity to power an entire city.”

WHAT… WHY?

She sounds like an awkward 12 year old girl!

Onto the characters:

Juliette:

I didn’t entirely buy into her character, especially with the way the portrayal of trauma was abruptly dropped. It’s as if she needs to stop indulging in dramatic devices, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, she’s just another stubborn YA protagonist, destined to make frustratingly stupid choices.

Juliette supposedly can torture or kill people with her touch. She claims to have been locked away at a young age and to have lived in solitary confinement ever since. She’s a little kooky. I don’t really care.

Adam:

Are you kidding me? I’m stuck choosing between a passionately obsessed, problem-riddled psycho serial killer as a love interest and a duller-than-dull, cardboard-cutout, organic whole wheat waffle as a love interest?!

Adam is the organic whole wheat waffle. Just to be clear. He’s probably better for Juliette than the psycho serial killer, but apparently he’s not the endgame. 

To condense his character evolution, he transitioned from being a somewhat intriguing enigmatic oddball and Juliette’s acquaintance from third grade to… an exceedingly uninspiring disconcerting oddball and Juliette’s acquaintance from third grade.

This seems to be a classic case of instant infatuation masquerading as a childhood friendship turning into love. Arguably, the latter might be even more concerning. Adam’s entire narrative centers around a single childhood event (that is conveniently forgotten) and his lifelong pursuit of Juliette. This all seems rather dubious.

I wouldn’t have minded the portrayal of abuse as a subplot if it had been given more depth and development, instead of being mentioned once and then ignored. If the impact of the abuse had been explored further, it could have added an important layer to the character’s development. A more serious treatment of this topic would have elevated the narrative.

I had no problem with him until he and Juliette had a little dialogue sequence. He attempted to give her a blanket (this was before he knew that she had magical killing powers) and she told him not to touch her, but he was being all rebellious, and she said it again, and then she said this, to which he replied:

“Maybe I don’t want you to.”
He makes a harsh sound. “I disgust you that much?”

When someone tells you not to touch them, you back off. It’s basic courtesy and respect. Don’t assume it’s about you.

Warner:

Warner is the passionately obsessed, problem-riddled psycho serial killer. In case you were wondering. 

Some of my friends have been telling Warnette is a better ship than Julikent. I beg to differ. Adam may be an organic whole wheat waffle, but at least he’s not an edgy guy with problems that could be solved by therapy but he’s too tough for therapy so there’s that. *Ahem* Don’t mind me. Just ranting here. I did warn you.

He’s, uh, strangely fixated on Juliette and just won’t give up on pursuing her, even though she’s clearly not interested. First of all, he really needs to take a hint. Secondly, he’s blond?? That’s so random. I mean, when do you ever see villains with blond hair? (Ok, I take that back. After all Luke Castellan was blond, but to be fair, he was also a hero) I always imagined him with black hair until I saw some fanart of Juliette and there was Warner, with his blond hair. It’s just not sitting right with me. He and his evil self should get black hair. The pale emerald eyes are good, though.

WORLDBUILDING

What worldbuilding? All I know is that there’s something called The Reestablishment, which is supposed to be a dystopian government that supposedly does bad stuff. What bad stuff, exactly? Who knows? And apparently the planet is all desolate now because, of course, the sky is gray. *looks outside* Oh no, the sky is gray. We must be living in a post-apocalyptic world because obviously clouds aren’t a thing.

I didn’t hate it, but I certainly didn’t like it. 

3 stars, get that cover away from me before I actually throw up

Overall-

I won’t read the next book.

I might read the next book if I get a free copy.

I’m curious to see where the author can go since it is clear that she can write well. I think someone needed to reallyreallyreally edit her prose down to a more controllable level so that people could enjoy the story rather than cringe with every every every regurgitationeruptionspewinglisten you need to stop crossing me off or I’m gonna throw up some nasty virus on you incident of prose.

*deep breath* Ok, rant’s over. You can go now. Nothing to see here. Definitely not a book that looks like it’s been thrown around a lot.

XOXO

Aaradhyaa