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!

REVIEW: A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES

"A Court of Thorns and Roses" by Sarah J. Maas, published by Bloomsbury in 2015 is about this girl Feyre, who lives in a little hut in the woods. Her life is all about providing for her family, her crippled dad and her two sisters. She does that by hunting, what she´s really good at. 

One day in winter she enters the forest and comes across a wolf, who appears to be a fairy from the neighboring country called "Prythian". When Feyre notices the wolf´s nature, she kills him out of hatred for his kind. 

But Feyre doesn´t go unpunished: she has to pay the price when another fairy crosses the border between Prythian and the human world to get her. A life for a life.

So much for the plot.

Let´s get to the point where I talk about my opinion on the book.

- no spoiler -

When I first saw the cover, I honestly felt a little reluctant about this book. Even though everyone kept saying that the cover looks gorgeous, I personally thought and still think that it looks crappy. It looks very high-fantasy and kind of gothic, what was very deceptive to me. Only by judging this book by its cover, I expected a cheap story.

Fortunately I listened to everyone on youtube telling me that it is absolutely worth reading it - and they were so right!

When I read the first few pages, I wasn´t really sure what to think about it, because you already knew what was going to happen by what is written on the back side of the book and it didn´t seem to be very thrilling or something. I was so wrong.

Even though I usually don´t like fairies, especially when they are male - it just doesn´t seem to be very masculine and attractive to me -  I kept reading.

Although mask-wearing and shape-shifting faeries are not my favorite kind of characters, I condoned them. And at some point they even stopped bothering me, because there was just too much suspense to pay attention to something that unimportant.

The main characters I did like very much, even though Feyre seemed to be a little weird in the beginning. In the early stages I didn´t get why she did so much for her strange and cold-hearted family, but little by little you got to know her and her situation and I started to like her. 

After I read the first half of the book, I was addicted to it and I couldn´t stand not to go on reading it. I thought it was just about Feyre - whose name I pronounced so horribly wrong in my head - staying with the feary-guy to pay for her misdoing. 

Honestly, I didn´t expect this huge dimension the story had. There was such a strong love, so many complex characters with complicated relationships and an epic history of the whole empire. 

The best part of it was that all of this was unforeseeable, but still not out of clear sky. All the time I was wondering about the mysteries and secrets Feyre was wondering about as well; and when Feyre and thus me discovered the truth, I was amazed by how intelligent Sarah J. Maas plotted the whole story. It didn´t seem like she made up a weird and abrupt plot twist. It was there all the time, I just didn´t see it. All in all, I loved it despite my aversion at first.

                           

At goodreads I rated it five stars.
See you!