Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Review Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

I think it has been a month or so since I read this book and I remember being freaking excited about it, because I heard so many great things about it!
An insane girl with a lethal touch - HELL YEAH.
One of my very bookish and Marvel-obsessed friends was like: YOU SHOULD READ THAT BOOK. HERE - HAVE MINE. NO, WAIT. BUY YOUR OWN COPY. BUT READ IT. DO IT.
So I was like: sure, why the hell not.
Ugh, well. Uhm. 
Let's say that this book wasn't the best I spent my money on...

Summary

Juliette has a fatal touch and for that she is locked away from the society. They fear her like she's a monster. And all of that because she accidentally touched someone... Which caused the person death...
Right now she has't touched anyone for 264 days and isn't planning to touch anyone in the days that will follow. Not everybody agrees with that.
Because the world that we once knew so well is crumbling; we're running out of food, birds don't fly and the clouds are the wrong color. And The Reestablishment has to fix it all, for they are the rulers of the world. So they changed their mind about Juliette.
Perhaps she is what they need right now.
And now Juliette has a decision to make: Will she be a wapon or a warrior?

My opinion

Rate; 6.5/10

Like I said - I didn't really like this book.
It was a very nice concept - a girl who has grown insane for over the past seven years of her life and is now becoming a weapon for the world. I liked the idea of seeing her struggles, her development, her choices and their outcomes, but I felt like that didn't really happen. I didn't see it in this book.
The story had so much potential, in my opinion, and perhaps the rest of the series can make up for it, but it wasn't a great start and didn't make me really excited for the sequel (though I have read it).

The thing about the story is that it is quite fast paced. The few events follow up and you kind of rush through the book, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. How Juliette is confronted with the past and how she's being pushed into a new environment, a new life with other people in her company was something that was quite interesting to see. And the fact that all of it came over me, and overJuliette herself, leaving no time to actually process it, kind of fitted the story, simply because the protagonist didn't really know what was happenig to her either.
But still I felt like there should've been more, because not much has happened in the book. Yes, we could get to know Juliette and her insanity and we did get a bit of a view on the situation of the world she lives in, an yes, there were some pretty interesting and shocking events, but they weren't enough. I just felt something missing, and perhaps this is quite a vague explanation, but see it like this: When you listen to music on playlist, you have a few songs, new or old, that excite you a lot. And then when you actually reach the song, you start listening to it but for some reason the song ended way to soon and you didn't really get the message. It kind of left you with the feeling that you haven't listened to music at its fullest. 
Reading Shatter Me kind of felt like that.

When it comes to the relationships in the story, I feel like the author highlighted that way too much and that it was kind of forced. I get it - you are reunited with your childhood crush and it happens that the two of you really like it each other and stuff.
But I believe that the story should've way more about Juliette getting to know the world, the situation there and getting to know her powers. The relationship between her and her childhood crush should definitely be there to make stuff a bit more difficult for her or to help her get away from the danger, from the lies, from the evil, but it shouldn't be all about that and I felt that it was. It felt like reading a romantic novel than a young adult dystopian thriller (I did not look that up, by the way).

To connect still to the relationships; I found the descriptions of somes scenes (the intimate onces in particular) pretty repetitive. By that I mean like, Juliette always is like describing most of the things she's doing in her insane way, using sometimes the exact same words all over again and well... That kind of turns me off.

BUUTTTT.
There was something I did like! (Yay)
...And not really at the same time... (Nawhh...)
And that things is the writing style.
The thing I didn't like was the fact that it could get quite annoying sometimes. Like I said in the paragraph before, the repetiveness was something that could turn off very well, BUT it was that repetitiveness that actually perfectly fitted the protagonist's character.
Yeah, she is very repetitive. Very poetic. SHE IS INSANE AND WE LOVE HER FOR IT.
Well, the fans do :).
And I find that something very important - the author isn't the actual person who should be telling the story (unless it's writing in their perspective), the character should and Mafi has done that immensely well in this book.

Overall I really had turn offs for this book - I didn't really enjoy it. But it did have some good elements like the writing style was good in some way and I liked the concept of it!
The fact that a "weak" (I actually don't really like using that word), scared, "strange" (by strange I mean like, she is brought back to a world which she was locked away from) girl gets in this very important position and struggles with making the right decision. I just thought that Mafi didn't really worked out the concept that well...

Well - I guess you can't like all the books that a lot of people do like.
Sometimes you agree and sometimes you don't. That's just how it works.
Until the next blogpost, then! :)

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