Shatter Me: A Book Review

People can't actually take this book seriously, right?

Shatter Me, a novel by Tahereh Mafi, is a YA dystopian romance novel that, I am told, was not supposed to be written like it came from a middle-schooler’s Wattpad account? Stop the press and hold the phones, because what!?

I am a little embarrassed to admit that I did, in fact, read the entire novel (which luckily is on the shorter side, coming in at only 329 pages). I kept convincing myself that because people seem to like it so much, perhaps it’ll get better… spoiler alert: I actually believe that it got worse as the “story” progressed. I gave Shatter Me a solid two stars on both my Goodreads and Storygraph accounts, the review a single “😐”. I’m not even kidding. Were I to be gifted (for some reason, god I hope it doesn’t happen) the second book in this shockingly long series (I cannot fathom what content originating in this atrociously constructed world with these horrifically uninteresting characters Mafi could manage to churn out), I would probably read it— not because I particularly enjoyed the first novel, but because the sequel came to me as a gift. Otherwise, I hope to never touch this series again.

I was never a Wattpad girl, and perhaps that is why I did not enjoy this book. Had I been raised on poorly-written prepubescent fanfiction, this novel may have given me a sense of nostalgia… or pity… which may have overrided my ability to sense the braincells dying in my head one-by-one. Fun fact! Every time Juliette mentioned Adam’s eyes, or the bird, or how much her little superpower made her hate herself, OR anytime Mafi crossed out any word in an attempt to be “cool” and “different”, ten neurons exploded within the confines of my skull.

It was like Mafi went to a bookstore, saw The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner (which, by the way, all came out before Shatter Me) sitting on the shelves with a big sign above them that read “THESE books are THE BEST! COPY US FOR SUCCESS” and said “yeah, I can do that” except she couldn’t. Just based solely on having read this wannabe-edgy “ughhh my mom won’t let me go into Hot Topic!” type of book, I predict Mafi was the type of person who read The Hunger Games and thought it was a fun little story about a teenage girl with a silly name and the love triangle she happens to be stuck in. The Hunger Games is not a love story, but Shatter Me is— and while I have nothing against romances (for the most part… but that’s a rant for another day), I do have a problem with poorly written romances. The entire time I was reading Shatter Me, I legitimately could not stop subconsciously seeing the concerning number of similarities it shared with pre-existing stories.

The characters in Mafi’s novel are boring, their relationships creepy and unintentionally toxic (like, nuclear-waste toxic). Also, this series unfortunately falls under the cliche YA curse of “my main character is a teenager, just like my intended audience, but even though they’re not old enough to drink— let alone graduate high-school— they are waaaaayyy smarter and tougher than anyone around them and also somehow managed to acquire the skills of someone who’s trained three times as long as they have been alive.” What do you mean Warner is NINETEEN and leads an entire army? What do you mean Adam is barely a legal adult but he’s somehow managed to become this high-ranking, important, tough army guy? But his eyes! They’re blue! Good for Juliette, apparently solitary confinement didn’t make her loose her ability to tell colors apart.

I also found it strange that for how insanely obsessive Juliette was with Adam’s blue eyes and Warner’s green ones, she did not know the color of her own? It’s like her entire purpose within the story, despite being the main character, is to be a Y/N self-insert character for the theoretical teenage girls reading the book.

Is it wrong of me to say that there was not one singular bone in my body that cared what happened to any of these characters? Honestly, I was rooting for Juliette to lose. I was sick of her come page number two. The crossed-out sentences bothered me far less than the incredibly weird writing style. The sentence structure, the words chosen… I can’t put my finger on it, the entire novel just read weird and I can’t tell if that was a poorly made character choice or if that is genuinely how Mafi writes. Either way, as a human being who’s just so happened to interact with other human beings, that is not how people talk. Or think.

I think that Mafi attempted to be “different” with her prose and writing style, but it honestly just came off as unprofessional and juvenile. I was also heavily turned off by the fact Mafi had to genuinely add a disclaimer at the beginning of the novel, telling the reader that the random (unnecessary) crossed-off text was on purpose. I feel like considering she knew she needed to explain that should have been a huge sign just not to do it. I also feel like the crossed-off text may have worked better were it written in third person, where it could have signified Juliette’s “interjecting thoughts” (?)— but since it was all told from her point of view, it really made zero sense. Everything we read was what she thought (that’s how first-person works!), and you can’t unthink things.

I know what you’re saying right now, though: “what qualifications does SHE have to come on here and complain about a book people seem to love?” Well… I have a brain, and I am literate; both of which actually make me overqualified for this. Also, can I just say, does anyone else find it odd that this a YA book meant for 13+ year olds, and yet it is a bunch of 20+ year olds recommending it? Like, if you want to read it, that’s your prerogative, but you are most certainly not the target audience. I don’t believe these adults can find the story entertaining, or fulfilling, considering the content level is basically for fourteen-year-olds.

It also cannot just be me who thought that the hideout Kenji brings Juliette and Warner (and Warner’s brother, who, by the way, is a completely unnecessary character. Were I to cut him from the story entirely, literally nothing would change) to is just a knock-off District 13— because it really is. Kind of weird, if you ask me. On top of that, maybe it was a mistake on my part, but I also sort-of expected more from the powers/magic everyone else has in this wannabe District 13; like, “oooh that person turns invisible!!” OVERDONE; “And this person is very stretchy!!”. LAME. What is this— The Incredibles??

Not only do none of the characters have a single ounce of development, they also have no depth or personality beyond like one trait (which is told to us over and over and over again, sort of like in picture books). The plot is also basically nonexistent. I would not be surprised if news came out that one day that after Mafi had discovered her obsession with eyeballs, she just sat down at her computer and wrote this entire book in a single sitting— no outline or plot diagram either, just her and her plain-as-a-piece-of-paper characters. She just wrote, and every single time she had a thought or idea, she just added it in, not bothering to follow the typical linear plot of ever single other book out there. Who needs a proper beginning, middle, and end when you can just “AND THEN” your way through the chapters like you’re on some kind of improv team?

There were many pieces of dialog or exchanges between characters that made me want to either shrivel up from second-hand embarrassment or rip all of my hair out— I do not believe this book was meant to make it out of the Wattpad drafts. Seriously. Specifically, Juliette and Adam’s relationship felt so middle school, like something constructed from snippets of a 12-year-old’s diary. “[The outfit looks] sexy as hell.” / “You look like a superhero.” WHAT???

You cannot tell me a grown adult wrote this book for other grown adults. I simply don’t believe it.

I have also been unable to get over that one ridiculously random exchange Juliette had with Winston (AKA knock-off President Coin). The whole “Winston nicknamed Kenji Moto because he doesn’t want to say his full last name” thing was so arbitrary. Like, adding in the nickname “Moto” for Kenji was completely unnecessary, especially since it was only used that one time by Winston in order to give Juliette a reason to call him a hypocrite and tell him off for not using Kenji’s full name. As someone with a hard to pronounce name, I can tell you it’s really not that deep. Certainly not a big enough deal to add several paragraphs on the topic into your dystopian YA romance book (there are worse things happening in their world, this should not have been such a concern to the characters). Yes, you have a right not to want to be called a specific nickname, or whatever, but at the end of the day— it’s just a name. I have been called everything under the sun, and when someone mispronounces my name (which people do a lot), I’ll correct them, but I will not pester them about it, nor will I write about it in my book. For god’s sake, for an entire school semester, I responded to the name Ivanka because I didn’t bother correcting the teacher repeatedly on my actual name. And the Earth kept spinning. The whole conversation between Winston and Juliette about this not only didn’t make any sense but also felt completely out of place. Somone must have pissed Mafi off by saying her name wrong, or something, and she just ran right back home, opened up her Google Doc, and typed out that exchange between her characters in a “THIS’LL SHOW ‘EM” type of rage.

I’m just going to put this out there, but I definitely judge books by their covers (at least a little bit), and I simply cannot get over the ginormous eyeball on the front of this one. If that wasn’t bad enough, it’s got Juliette’s damn imaginary bird in it too (not to mention more crossed-off writing), and every book in this series also has a gigantic eyeball plastered right in the middle. This I will not blame Mafi for, as most traditionally published authors do not choose their book covers, but it still upsets me. Greatly. STOP WITH THE EYEBALLS! I’m SICK of it; it’s WIERD.

Shatter Me is very much a 300 page long one-trick pony; there is no reason behind anything, no substance. I’m not saying it has to be something people can heavily analyze, a hidden meaning between every line, but a little purpose behind everything might have been nice. All I request is the ability to answer simple what, why, and how questions in relation to the book!… and for a story that perhaps isn’t mediocre, corny, or a huge waste of my time.

I also did not enjoy how Juliette’s power randomly shifted gears halfway through the book. At first, we are told that she is unable have skin-to-skin contact with anyone, or else she will kill (electrocute? poison? we don’t really know) them. But then, all of a sudden, she can break her way through concrete/stone walls… for some reason? And then she claws through a metal door when she has to save Adam from the abandoned factory at the end of the book (despite the fact she still needed a knife to cut through rope)? I honestly think Mafi didn’t define Juliette’s power in some sensible way so that she could allow Juliette’s magic to basically do whatever was needed for the story, which, once again, just feels really unprofessional and child-like. I’m not saying we have to have a textbook definition of her power on page one, a little mystery and learning-as-you-go is a good thing, but just letting whatever Mafi’s current whim was at the time of her writing a scene control things is not typically recommended.

None of the other characters seemed to care about Juliette’s newfound power either— honestly, none of the other characters seemed to care about Juliette (or anything) at all. She spends half of the book crying and complaining about how everyone is scared of her or how everyone thinks she is crazy (which, do you blame them?), and yet we never see this! If people had such strong negative feelings about our main character, you would think us readers would get to watch that play out. Instead, we got to read about how Adam and Warner have creepy little obsessive crushes on Juliette— and that’s it. None of Warner’s strange “omg I love her” “I will use her to torture people” switch ups were ever explained (but then again, neither was the lore of the world. Tiny bits of mis-matching information was just lobbed at us like dog turds); Adam’s only reason for doing anything was just “Juliette was the only person who was ever nice to me in elementary school”— which is crazy thinking considering they never even spoke!

Juliette has this power Mafi seems unable to explain to us how it works (as previously stated), so it kind of just feels like an excuse for anything to happen when there would otherwise have been a problem resolving some kind of in-book issue. Her power reads like a poorly constructed plot device instead of a trait/ability she just has. It’s not a soft magic system, it’s something a child would make up while playing pretend with their friends. “My magic is so powerful, it kills anyone who touches me!” “Okay, well, what if you’re trapped in that room, then?” “Well… I can ALSO punch my way through walls! Ha!”

I also wonder, does Juliette’s murder-touch only work on people? What if she were to touch a flower? Would she kill it, too? If not, how does it distinguish between living-person and living-thing? If she hurts any living thing she touches, imagine how good she’d be at pest control. Screw torturing people, Warner really needs to turn her into a human flyswatter— put her powers to good use.

I’m just going to say it; Warner wanting to use Juliette to “torture people” (while also being his honey booboo bear) is, once more, an idea children playing with their toys would come up with. Pretty much the entire world, minus the knock-off District 13, follows his daddy’s new dystopian government, (plus there are way less people left), who does he need to torture? And why does he need her to do it?? Of course, torturing people is wrong and awful, but there are a million and one easier ways to do it! Have we learned nothing from medieval times? What he’s doing feels like the grown-up version of when boys in elementary school would pull on girls’ piggy-tails “because they liked them”; Waren has a total Stockholm-syndrome inducing crush on Juliette (for what reason, I do not know. It’s not like he even knows her), and for this reason he’s coming up with makeshift evil plans (to impress her? to scare her off? I do not know). Adam may be insufferable, but at least he’s not some wannabe evil overlord.

But honestly, while I did not enjoy Shatter Me (as I am sure you can tell by now), I have read worse books; although this one isn’t high on my list, either. Unfortunately, this one was just not for me, and while I do not see the appeal of this book— to each their own! …I guess.

So, what did we learn here? For me, it was not to trust the booktok/bookstagram masses with recommendations. If the same people who think Icebreaker and Fourth Wing are quality novels also suggest other books for you to read, perhaps don’t listen to them.