Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi (pub date 11/15/11)
Shatter Me is the latest entry in the already oversaturated market of dystopian YA novels. Written by 23-year-old newcomer Tahereh Mafi, it’s a book that starts off with a lot of promise and unfortunately deteriorates into a derivative mess of flat characters and exhausting, overused metaphors. Take X-Men and mix it with a 1980s Paul Verhoeven film (minus a good portion of the violence of course) and you’ll end up with this book, more or less.
Set in an undetermined point in the future, Shatter Me presents a world in which our natural resources are all but used up, where people live in disease and desperation, and a militant group known as the Reestablishment has seized control of the country. Seventeen-year-old Juliette is a girl born with an unusual ability: she absorbs the energy of anyone she touches, killing them in the process. Locked away in an insane asylum after accidentally killing someone,Rogue Juliette spends a year alone in her cell until she is released by a high-ranking member of the Reestablishment who offers her an interesting proposition: a life of luxury in exchange for her services as a torturer. Soon Rogue Juliette escapes with the help of Adam, a soldier who rebels against the Reestablishment.
Unfortunately, that’s where the book stops being good. After that it felt to me as if someone else took over writing the book and made it up as they went along. Gone is the moral conflict, the character development, and even the writing style, replaced instead by Juliette mooning over Adam for a hundred or so pages, and then a haphazard non-ending that naturally sets up for a sequel.
I get that this is a YA book, but I’m also willing to go out on a limb and assert that most teens are too intelligent for this book. The entire second half of the book reads like the diary of an overly dramatic 11-year-old, complete with obnoxious hyperbole and ridiculous metaphors on every other page:
Shatter Me is the latest entry in the already oversaturated market of dystopian YA novels. Written by 23-year-old newcomer Tahereh Mafi, it’s a book that starts off with a lot of promise and unfortunately deteriorates into a derivative mess of flat characters and exhausting, overused metaphors. Take X-Men and mix it with a 1980s Paul Verhoeven film (minus a good portion of the violence of course) and you’ll end up with this book, more or less.
Set in an undetermined point in the future, Shatter Me presents a world in which our natural resources are all but used up, where people live in disease and desperation, and a militant group known as the Reestablishment has seized control of the country. Seventeen-year-old Juliette is a girl born with an unusual ability: she absorbs the energy of anyone she touches, killing them in the process. Locked away in an insane asylum after accidentally killing someone,
Unfortunately, that’s where the book stops being good. After that it felt to me as if someone else took over writing the book and made it up as they went along. Gone is the moral conflict, the character development, and even the writing style, replaced instead by Juliette mooning over Adam for a hundred or so pages, and then a haphazard non-ending that naturally sets up for a sequel.
I get that this is a YA book, but I’m also willing to go out on a limb and assert that most teens are too intelligent for this book. The entire second half of the book reads like the diary of an overly dramatic 11-year-old, complete with obnoxious hyperbole and ridiculous metaphors on every other page:
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“Realization slams into me like two hundred pounds of common sense.”
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“My heart is a field of lilies blooming under a pane of glass, pitter-pattering to life like a rush of raindrops.”
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“I’m a cumulonimbus existence of thunder and lightning.”
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“My stomach is filled with beating drums pounded into synchronicity by my heart.”
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“He’s a hot bath, a short breath, five days of summer pressed into five fingers writing stories on my body.”
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“His eyes are a midnight moment filled with memories”
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“I’m oxygen and he’s dying to breathe.”
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“His skin is 100 degrees hotter than it was a moment ago.”
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“There are fifteen thousand feelings of disbelief hole-punched in my heart.”
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“His eyes are two buckets of rainwater.”
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“Every organ in my body falls to the floor.”
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“My heart is a stick of butter melting with reckless abandon.”
It just goes on and on. Such literary devices like these, when used sparingly, can be effective. But when they are used ad nauseum, they are just laughable, and only point to the inexperience of the writer. And they make me want to gouge out my eyes with a trillion sporks…sorry, I had to get one in there somewhere! Granted, the version I read was an uncorrected proof, so I hope for the sake of the future readers that the editor has cut out most of that nonsense. However, it is apparent that Mafi lives in hyperbole; she declares on her blog that she owns “eleventy billion pairs of shoes.” Ooookay. It is a shame, because this could have been a decent YA novel. Somewhere under all that filler and weak writing was a good story struggling to get out. The book is meant to be the first in a new series, but I have no desire to read any further. And I think YA fans can do better.
