Book Review: Shatter Me
Title: Shatter Me.
Author: Tahereh Mafi
Genre: YA Fiction, Dystopia
Publisher: Australian edition first published by Allen & Unwin in 2011.
This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2021
Publication Date: 2011
Rating: ★★★★☆
There are some benefits to having a daughter who loves reading; she shares her books with me.
Shatter Me is probably not one that I would have chosen to read unless I had seen my daughter read it first.
༄ ༄ ༄ ༄ ༄ ༄ ༄ ༄
When Juliette Ferrar is placed in an asylum for the mentally insane, she has no idea how long she will be kept in isolation. She does not even know whether she is insane. All that she knows is that she can torture and kill people simply by touching them and this is not something that she wants to do.
Juliette is given a cellmate, Adam, to see how she will react but it takes a while to find out why. She remembers him from when they went to school as children. It turns out that Adam is a soldier for The Reestablishment, a group set up to bring in a new world order and obliterate how things were done in the past. They will stop at nothing to get what they what and this includes killing people who get in their way and go against their ideology.
Juliette’s ability is of special interest to one of the key and ruthless commanders in The Reestablishment. Adam is charged with keeping Juliette safe and it turns out that he remembers her from their school days too.
The commander grows more intent on using Juliette’s ability to cause pain from her touch and to use it for his own purposes. Juliette escapes with Adam’s help and they begin a journey to seek a safe place away from The Reestablishment. The world is a place that Juliette no longer recognises. So much has changed and trusting other people is difficult.
This is the first in a series of three novels. There were some interesting features in this novel that were unusual and fascinating in that they added rather than detracted from the story. Mafi uses repetition of words and phrases and sometimes this is unpunctuated. This adds a poetic or lyrical quality to the text. Sometimes it is just one word written over and over again. Mafi uses strikethrough text as a device in which we see Juliette’s thoughts crossed out, like we are only allowed to see the polished copy of her thoughts. It adds to the story. Another device is writing all numerals less than ten as numbers rather than words. This adds a disjointed or disconnected feel to the story.
Shatter Me explores themes of trust, betrayal, self-discovery and empowerment through the character of Juliette. In Adam, we see themes of love, acceptance of difference, loyalty and friendship. In a world where social order and the environment have broken down, themes of environmental disaster and social cohesion are explored. Questions are raised around the idea of power, fear and accepting others for who they are.
When I started reading Shatter Me, I must admit I thought it was dreary and depressing. I did wonder why young people would like to read a story that featured much introspection and was so bleak. The world in which Juliette operated was bleak, and Juliette’s prospects and future looked bleak. However, the story’s pace picked up and the questions posed throughout the book are riveting. There is complexity and depth within the characters of both Juliette and Adam that make the reader care about them and want to keep reading.
My youngest son recently told me, ‘I love dystopian fiction, Mum! Future gone wrong.’ I love this definition. This book fits this definition with so much of the future gone wrong but with the hope in Juliette and Adam that something could still go right. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves dystopian fiction including those like me who haven’t read a lot in this genre.
I am looking forward to reading the second book in the series.
