Fabulous reads – Cracks in world-building dampened story

Shatter Me (Shatter Me #1), Tahereh Mafi, Penguin Random House; ISBN: 9781405291750

WHEN this series landed on my desk, I was in awe at how stunning the covers look in paperback and beyond excited to climb into this brand new world.

The introductory chapters are breathtakingly stunning. The introductory chapters are breathtakingly stunning. Juliette, the teen who has been jailed for a crime, has not spoken a word to herself, or another living soul, for more than 200 days. Her life consists of a small room, a tiny window, a bed, blanket, pen and notebook.

Her sanity seems to be crumbling like the world outside of her prison cell. There is punctuation missing and Juliette’s thoughts are allowed to ramble across the pages, words are crossed out and replaced with other, lighter notes. It gives you a real sense of her head space and what the isolation has done to her. A truly broken hero with a hope for freedom that is so deep you can almost feel it.

ALSO READ: Fabulous reads – A YA thriller you should be dying to read

It was a breath of fresh air in a stagnant pool of YA novels – until it wasn’t.

Adam is cast into her cell, and from there a whole new story begins to brew. One of deception, love, action and survival. Tahereh leans so heavily on the typical dystopian drama and the love triangle trope that I rolled my eyes, more than once. The author’s world building is atrocious at best and is her inconsistency is the only constant throughout the novel. Juliette moves from meek and mild to unbelievably overpowered at the flip of a switch and the world’s rules bend when the author needs them to.

There are many fans out there that would disagree with me, but there are much better YA novels to be read. #SorryNotSorry.

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