Review Detail

After all the hype surrounding this book, I decided to give it a read. The premise: Juliette’s touch is lethal. Her parents couldn’t give her the love she craved. At school, she wasn’t allowed to interact with other children in case she harmed them. Her world is one of physical isolation and extreme loneliness.

At the age of fourteen, the unintentional use of Juliette’s “power” causes her to be taken from her parents’ home, submitted to batteries of tests, and eventually placed in solitary confinement for almost a year. The only thing that keeps her company is a notebook in which she pens her innermost thoughts, often censoring what she considers unacceptable by crossing out entire lines of text. One day she wakes up to the sight of her new cellmate: Adam.

Juliette is emotionally shattered by her ability, by what it does to her and what it can potentially do to others. The society where she lives is a dystopian one. Her world is in a state of environmental decay, extreme poverty and political chaos. One powerful individual seeks out her ability and wishes to use her as a weapon in his new social order, where old ideologies are to be destroyed and replaced.

Warner, a powerful young man in the military, frees Juliette from her prison and wants to harness her ability. Adam is one of Warner’s soldiers, and he falls in love with Juliette and is determined to free her from this new life, where she is just as much a prisoner as she was before.

Juliette is easy to identify with. She is frightened, lonely, hungry for someone’s touch, and determined not to use her ability to harm anyone. What is most captivating about Shatter Me is the stream-of-consciousness writing. The reader is immersed in Juliette’s thoughts, and the style reflects her broken, shattered mind. It is this rich style that gives the novel its uniqueness and carries the reader through the scenes.

The pace is rapid and the tension steadily mounts as Juliette tries to find her freedom and a place where she belongs. At the same time, the plot contains several very convenient coincidences, and they are not always entirely plausible. The reader needs to suspend disbelief on many occasions, and I found myself jolted out of the narrative more than once wondering: Isn’t it convenient that when Juliette is on the run, hungry, and desperate for transportation, she just happens to find a car with keys in the ignition and a bag of groceries in the back seat?

The ending has a contrived, X-Men flavour about it, which left me with a bitter taste of disappointment. After such a promising beginning, I had hoped for a more original ending, not one replete with clichés. Still, for its stream-of-consciousness writing style and insight into the character’s shattered life, Shatter Me is definitely worth reading.