REVIEW: SHATTER ME

" Shatter me" by Tahereh Mafi, published by HaperCollins in 2012 takes place in a dystopian world and deals with Juliette´s life, that it different from lives of other girls her age. The reason is Juliette being different from other girls - her touch is lethal.

The story starts with Juliette being in a prison cell as a punishment for killing a little boy a few years ago. She spends her time writing in a little notebook, till a young man called Adam becomes her cell mate.

Things develop and Juliette and Adam get to know each other, meawhile she still asks herself if
she goes insane and why she´s different from anyone else.

Everything changes when Warner, the leader of the Reestablishment´s Sector 45, tries to convince Juliette in his own, cruel way to cooperate with the government. They want to use her as a torture instrument.







When Juliette and Adam - who appears to be Warner´s best soldier and her personal sentinel - get in trouble, they decide to flee, what occurs to be a dangerous undertaking.

My personal opinion on the book

 - no spolier -

This book was everywhere! People talked about it in every book haul, enthused about it in wrap ups and TBRs.
I felt like I shouldn´t miss it, so I bought it on amazon.

Superficiality first: to me the cover looks okay; it´s not the most beautiful one I´ve ever seen, but its aspect promises a lot of suspense, at least that´s how I feel about it.




Let´s get down to my opinion on the story. First at all it may be important to know that I´m not a native speaker. That might be the reason why my view differs from others.

I honestly was a little afraid if this book measures up to everyone´s expectations, because they were raised very high.

When I first started to read this book, I liked it a lot. It´s so different from everything that I´ve read before. Tahereh Mafi´s style is so unique and the crossed out lines make you feel like you´re reading Juliette´s diary.

Nevertheless, I had difficulties with reading this book on the whole. Tahereh´s English is beautiful, but I had to look up countless words and that sucked. Sometimes there was just too much poetic stuff in one sentence. Instead of using the word " cry" to describe that the main character ... cried, Mafi made use of symbols and metaphors and allegories, what´s pretty cool on the one hand, but a pain in the neck on the other.

Still, the author makes it so easy to imagine this girl, sitting alone in a cold cell, cowering down. Juliette really starts to believe that she´s insane, because she´s so lonely and never touched a person after this horrible incident; her parents never loved her like parents love their normal children - and I felt so bad for her.

Even though it was hard for me to read this book from a perspective of a person, who behaves like she´s insane, I liked this girl so much.




Continuing reading this book, my sympathy for her shrank. To me she acted as if in a trance, she behaved in a weird way and let things just happen, instead of acting like a kick-ass heroin. Sure, this is kind of lifelike when you consider everything she´s been through, but still it wasn´t fun to read. Her free will seemed to be broken, although she tried to break free once or twice.

In the end I liked her a little more again, because she finally awakened from her weird passive state and did a few really cool things I didn´t expect from her.

Adam was my favourite character, because he is a man of action. And what´s about this Warner guy? Everyone loves him, but I don´t get it. When people talk about this book, it always sounds like a love-triangle, but I can´t see it. Please, enlighten me!

And the end of the book, seriously? I didn´t expect that, but it really makes me want to continue reading.

On goodreads I rated it four stars.
Let me know what you guys think in the comment section below.

See you!