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Friday, November 25, 2011

Shatter Me (Shatter Me #1) by Tahereh Mafi

Shatter Me
Release Date: November 15th, 2011
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 346
Age Group: Young Adult
Source: Book Club/Publisher
Format: ARC
Cover Love: book_open.png book_open.png book_open.png book_open.png / 5 (Like the glass and the slash through 'Shatter Me' but I think the dress and Juliette I suppose, are okay, and the color choices don't exactly match.) 
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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.

In this electrifying debut, Tahereh Mafi presents a world as riveting as
The Hunger Games and a superhero story as thrilling as The X-Men. Full of pulse-pounding romance, intoxicating villainy, and high-stakes choices,Shatter Me is a fresh and original dystopian novel—with a paranormal twist—that will leave readers anxiously awaiting its sequel.


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Shatter Me is one of the best dystopian novels I've read after The Hunger Games. Instead of swaying toward ideal societies like that in
 Matched, Shatter Me brings out the nitty-gritty in life after an apocalypse. I love that there are so many things that drew me into our world, but throw me back into that world as well (like the mention of a microwave-like machine called the Automat which literally blows up food into bigger pieces.) 

But, like all government takeovers after the world almost ends, Shatter Me isn't perfect. My biggest problem with this book is the hurried, spontaneous romance between the main character, Juliette, and a boy from her school days. Sure, maybe it was something cosmic that brought them together, but the way they bonded seemed more fantasy than reality. There's one point in the book where Juliette feels betrayed, but that moment is completely swept over by that emotion in your gut that tells you "They're going to end up together. No matter what." This doesn't give a lot of room for a weepfest. 

My next biggest problem is the pacing. Overall, I thought it was pretty good; it didn't keep me racing into the night but I didn't completely drop it. But it was very choppy, and for some reason, I kept getting different moods for different parts of the story, like part a and part b and part c didn't sound like one novel-it sounded like it was supposed to be split up into different books. This might be good or bad depending on your viewpoint, and I suppose its a pretty interesting method; but I would've liked it better a little bit more, well, smooth. 

My absolutely favorite part is the character portrayed in Juliette. She's got a lot of dimensions; kind, shy, bold, rash. Sometimes, she is a bit too sweet or a bit too whiney, but its a dash of pepper and salt here and there for any character. I love her voice-its an interesting way of writing a human being's feelings, with lots of repeating repeating repeating and crossed out words. She also has a delicate prose that I continually mistook for poetry-it was that beautiful and unique. 

Though with a few flaws, Shatter Me had a lot of great material that I'm looking forward to in the next book (because of course, there has to be one), and even though it may not be a page-turner, Shatter Me is a lot of great dystopian entertainment in three hundred pages.
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And to make this post even longer, check out some interesting links about Shatter Me: 


http://youtu.be/pT1KL-wmNyU (The Book Trailer) 
http://www.stiryourtea.blogspot.com/ (Tahereh Mafi's Blog)
http://taherehmafi.tumblr.com/post/5223879481/okay-guys-i-have-recorded-my-voice-in-an (A Link for People who Can't Pronounce Tahereh Mafi's Name; I Couldn't. :D)

1 comments:

Jadee (:

The Layout is so adorable! I just love it!

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