Review: Shatter Me

SHATTER ME (Shatter Me #1)
Tahereh Mafi
Paranormal Young Adult
352 pages
HarperTeen
Available November 15th
Received at BEA

THE STORY
Juliette has spoken to no one in 264 days. She has touched no one in 264 days. Bad things happen to those she with whom she comes in physical contact, hence the reason she's currently in a tiny solitary cell in a seemingly empty asylum. As a result of her condition, she's understandably shocked when her cell is opened and a young man is shoved in.

Juliette recognizes the young man from years ago when she was still in school–a boy she never spoke to but who was the only person to look at her and not see a freak. She spends weeks in the cell with Adam, finally beginning to remember what it's like to interact with another person, only to have her reality shift again as the reason for Adam's sudden appearance becomes clear.

There's a war going on outside Juliette's cell. A war for the recreation of society through the elimination of everything that came before it. And those in power want Juliette to use her "gift" to help them achieve their goals. They need a monster on their side, and now that they've found Juliette, they have no desire to let her go.

MY THOUGHTS
Shatter Me is a striking debut, the writing style captivating in its poetic quality as we are not simply told a story, but told a story beautifully. Ms. Mafi has a way of pairing words together into short phrases and sentences that hold us transfixed, forcing us to read the pages slowly in order to absorb the minutest detail while we attempt to quell the desire to flip the pages at record speed just to know what happens. At first the continued presence of crossed-out thoughts is a bit distracting, but as we spend more time with Juliette, we begin to look forward to those tiny disclosures of how she truly feels as opposed to how she thinks she’s supposed to feel, and we eagerly anticipate what we’ll find on the next page as the uniqueness of this reading experience makes us sit up and pay attention.

A connection to Juliette is easy to form when we're unceremoniously dropped into the dark, dank cell in which she has spent the past 264 days alone, our guard instantly up and extended to envelope her so that we can protect her from any further loneliness and despair by our mere presence. We learn about her past slowly and methodically, and with each sliver of knowledge she becomes more and more important to us. Her strength of will is astounding, allowing her to emerge fully intact mentally and emotionally from months of endless nothingness, and she shocks us with her ability to show compassion to a complete stranger when she has never been on the receiving end of it herself. Despite everyone in her life betraying her, she still finds the ability to trust, and she earns in us a loyal friend regardless of her existence merely in fiction.

While both Juliette and Adam are well-developed and desperately intriguing characters, the world itself remains a bit of a mystery to us in this first installment. We go from one set of four walls to another to yet another, our glimpses of an attempt at creating civilization anew only fleeting, and our knowledge of the Reestablishment limited. We see enough to know our loyalties lie with any resistance mustered against the annihilation of modern society, but there is a sense of claustrophobia while reading as our prison of solitary ignorance only changes in appearance–concrete walls bleeding into sinister opulence and then later into scientific minimalism–rather than disappearing entirely and releasing us to explore the environment with all our available senses.

Despite that minor drawback, Shatter Me is a refreshing read full of romance and suspense, written in a way we will not soon forget. Things are left incomplete, but we step back into our reality with a sense of hope, Juliette finally finding a group of people in whom her trust is not misplaced as well as a home where the word “monster” no longer holds the negative connotations it once did. For those who enjoy something different, Shatter Me will be an exciting and memorable read with characters, story, and prose coming together to create a true work of art.

Rating: 4/5