Saturday 23 August 2014

Review - Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

13455782 Genre: young adult / fantasy / science fiction / dystopian / romance
Pages: 340
Rating: 3 / 5 stars
Goodreads

Summary from Goodreads
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.


My thoughts
I had heard lots of good things about this book. In the beginning it was even better than I thought it would be. 

SPOILER I loved it when Adam turned out to work for Warner and was not, as Juliette thought, a fellow prisoner in the asylum. END SPOILER

 It reminded me a lot of 1984. I thought this books would be really unique because the author would not be afraid to make radical plot twist. Unfortunately it turned out this was not the case. After the first big plot twist which I loved and made me super excited for the rest of the book it dragged on an on really without anything interesting happening. Although I have never read a book before about a girl that had certain powers and is inprisoned for it, it felt a little bit like I had read this book before.
I thought Juliette's power was really vague. Throughout the entire book it is written that her touch is lethal, but personally I don't consider that a power. Death is a consequence of an action which is in fact Juliette's power, but this action is never stated. I was a little annoyed by that. For example: if Julliete could electrocute people with her touch that would be her power and death would be the consequence of the electrocution. There are infinite ways a person can die so I would have liked to know a little more about how exactly Juliette's power works.
The thing that frustrated me the most about this book was the level of sanity Juliette showed. In my opinion she was far to sain for someone who had spend the last 260 days in isolation.
Throughout the book there where hardly any female side characters and the ones that where present almost immediately left again. The main side characters Warner and Adam where not annoying, they where just a little boring. Adam hardly has a personality and Warner is a little crazy because he's got daddy issues, which was to clearly stated for my liking.
Although there where a lot of things about this books that I would have liked to be different, I still enjoyed reading it. I just don't think I'll be reading the next book in the trilogy.