Book Review: Ignite Me {Shatter Me #3} by Tahereh Mafi

Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pub. Date: February 2014
Genre: YA/Sci-fi/Dystopian
Source/Format: Library/Hardcover

From Goodreads: The heart-stopping conclusion to the New York Times bestselling Shatter Me series, which Ransom Riggs, bestselling author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, called “a thrilling, high-stakes saga of self-discovery and forbidden love.”

With Omega Point destroyed, Juliette doesn’t know if the rebels, her friends, or even Adam are alive. But that won’t keep her from trying to take down The Reestablishment once and for all. Now she must rely on Warner, the handsome commander of Sector 45. The one person she never thought she could trust. The same person who saved her life. He promises to help Juliette master her powers and save their dying world . . . but that’s not all he wants with her.

The Shatter Me series is perfect for fans who crave action-packed young adult novels with tantalizing romance like Divergent by Veronica Roth, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and Legend by Marie Lu. Tahereh Mafi has created a captivating and original story that combines the best of dystopian and paranormal, and was praised by Publishers Weekly as “a gripping read from an author who’s not afraid to take risks.” Now this final book brings the series to a shocking and satisfying end.

**This review contains spoilers for Ignite Me, as well as the previous books in the series.

If you've been keeping up with my journey through the Shatter Me series, you know that I've made no secret of my mixed feelings about it. But, boy, did Ignite Me exceed my expectations! From the first page to the last, the book had my attention in a stranglehold. Finally things were moving, and finally Juliette was becoming the character I'd wished she'd been in the earlier books. At first, I found her personality shift a bit jarring; I mean, I know she got shot in the chest and all, but it was still kind of hard for me to reconcile this new, badass, take-on-the-world Juliette with the timid girl she was throughout so much of the previous books. Then again, if I were miraculously brought back to life, maybe I'd be filled with mega-confidence and vengeful zeal, too. In any case, Juliette's change was definitely for the better.

Speaking of personality shifts...Adam. WHAT THE HELL, DUDE? It's completely understandable that he felt hurt and betrayed and all that jazz, but WOW! Possessive, much? He was like the crazy-jealous controlling ex-boyfriend in this book, and if I had any qualms about him and Juliette being over, Tahereh Mafi did a good job of squashing them. It was frightening to see the dark turn Adam's personality took in this book; at times he was downright cruel. Toward the end I half-expected him to betray Juliette and the others out of sheer spite.

While Adam's drastic personality shift was enough to get me to root for Team Warner, I liked that Mafi offered us some stronger evidence for the case against Adam/Juliette. Juliette's relationships with both Adam and Warner went from being focused on physical attraction to the effect each boy had on Juliette her mentally and emotionally:

"I think he wants to pretend I'm the girl who doesn't really speak and spends most of her time being scared. The kind of girl he needs to protect and take care of all the time. I don't know if he likes who I am now. I don't know if he can handle it."
- Juliette on Adam

I like the way I feel about myself when I'm with him...Warner thinks I'm strong and smart and capable and he actually values my opinion. He makes me feel like his equal--like I can accomplish just as much as he can, and more. And if I do something incredible, he's not even surprised. He expects it. He doesn't treat me like I'm some fragile little girl who needs to be protected all the time."
- Juliette on Warner

I've got to hand it to Mafi--she can take a character you would never in a million years think you'd love and make you fall for that same character so hard you get whiplash. I hated Warner at the end of Shatter Me and for much of Unravel Me, and was furious with Juliette for being so easily blinded by her physical attraction to him. And then along came Destroy Me. Everything I thought I knew about Warner, well, unraveled. We got inside his head, learned his true motives and his reasoning, and suddenly, everything that happened in Shatter Me took on a whole different meaning. (I still can't quite forgive him for putting Juliette through the simulation, however. Regardless of the outcome, it was still a pretty sadistic thing to do, letting her believe that the child was real.) But Warner turned out to be interesting; he was neither wholly good nor wholly evil. He was complex. And, yeah, totally swoon-worthy. I mean, come on. Chapter 55? GOOD. LORD.

Ignite Me turned out to be pretty light on the action and surprisingly heavy on Juliette's personal relationships, not only with Adam and Warner but with the other characters as well. Especially Kenji. Oh, Kenji. I adored him. He provided great comic relief, and his lines almost always had me laughing out loud. While I enjoyed the focus on the personal relationships, it did detract a bit from the action in the story. So much of the last third of the book was spent on Juliette and Warner's relationship that the final battle seemed to come out of nowhere, and it felt rushed. There was a bit of struggle between Juliette and Anderson, but in the end it seemed like she won far too easily. I would have liked to see a more challenging fight. As for the final pages, I can't believe we're left hanging like that! There was so much more story potential and I had so many questions: How is Juliette going to become the new leader? Will there be backlash? What of the other sectors? What is going on in the rest of the world? And just how was Anderson able to create the Reestablishment to begin with? I NEED ANSWERS, TAHEREH!

And so ends my journey with the Shatter Me series. Verdict: I can say without a doubt now that I am most definitely a fan.

Book Review: Unravel Me by Tahereh Mafi {Shatter Me #2} -- AKA My Warner Rant

Unravel Me (Shatter Me #2) by Tahereh Mafi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pub Date: February 2013
Genre: YA/Dystopian/Sci-Fi
Source/Format: Library/Paperback

From Goodreads:

Juliette has escaped to Omega Point. It is a place for people like her—people with gifts—and it is also the headquarters of the rebel resistance.

She's finally free from The Reestablishment, free from their plan to use her as a weapon, and free to love Adam. But Juliette will never be free from her lethal touch.

Or from Warner, who wants Juliette more than she ever thought possible.

In this exhilarating sequel to Shatter Me, Juliette has to make life-changing decisions between what she wants and what she thinks is right. Decisions that might involve choosing between her heart—and Adam's life.

I honestly don't even know where to begin talking about Unravel Me. I have so many emotions. It was exciting, it was steamy, it was frustrating, it was infuriating...it was all the adjectives, basically. And I'm still trying to figure out whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know is that I enjoyed Unravel Me more than Shatter Me, and even though I was correct when I predicted the direction this book was going, I'm not as upset about it as I thought I would be. I think. I'm upset that Mafi spent so much of Shatter Me convincing me that Warner is this horrible, irredeemably bad guy, only to shove Juliette into his arms in Unravel Me. I feel just as conflicted as Juliette, which I suppose is a good thing (I take it as a sign of good writing if you feel everything the character feels), but at the same time drives me crazy! Warner has done bad things. Really bad things. But I pity him because of his upbringing and the fact that he has a horrible father, and also because he does seem to have the capacity for love and kindness where Juliette is concerned. But just because I (and Juliette) pity him, does that mean he can be forgiven for all the wrong he has done? Should he get off scott-free? I'm not so sure. But now that he's a love interest, I don't want anything to happen to him. I almost want him to skip merrily off into the sunset with Juliette. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?

What bothered me most about Juliette's relationship with Warner is that, at first, it's mainly driven by her physical attraction to him, which, given the circumstances, makes her seem extremely shallow. It was disappointing to see that a little lust was all it took to tip the balance in Warner's favor. I would have been more okay with the whole thing if Juliette had connected with Warner because she felt their miserable upbringings and their yearning for attention and love made them understand each other...but all of that seemed secondary to the physical attraction. And yes, I get that physical attraction is a big deal for Juliette because she's never had the chance to experience it before, but should it really outweigh what she knows about Warner and what he's done?

And then there's Adam. Poor, poor Adam. This dude just can't catch a break. First he's nearly killed and then brought back to life, then he finds out he's not immune to Juliette's touch like everyone thought, then Juliette almost kills him, and THEN she goes and starts having feelings for Warner. I don't know what Ignite Me has in store for Adam but I hope he's able to find some sort of happiness, whether it's with Juliette or not.

Love triangle aside, Unravel Me did have some pretty thrilling action, which kept the story moving along at a nice pace. The war between the Reestablishment and the rebels escalated to an exciting (and unexpected) finish. I'm glad Mafi delved more into the story of Omega Point and Castle, whom, to be honest, I had a hard time trusting for the first half of the book. It was his relationship with Kenji and his willingness to accept Warner into Omega Point that finally convinced me he was a good guy, not power-hungry leader hiding behind his supposed good intentions. And while Juliette frustrated me so much throughout the book, the transformation she undergoes at the end has me very excited for Ignite Me. It will be interesting to see how her new-found confidence and strength will change her, and which side she will choose.

I'm ready to do something I'll definitely regret and this time I don't care. I'm done being nice. I'm done being nervous. I'm not afraid of anything anymore. Mass chaos is in my future. And I'm leaving my gloves behind.

Book Review: "Shatter Me" by Tahereh Mafi

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pub Date: November 2011
Source/Format: Library/Hardcover

From Goodreads:

Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war – and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

For the first time in I don't know how long, I finished a book in two days! So thank you, Tahereh Mafi, for breaking me out of my slow-reading slump! Shatter Me is a bit sluggish at the start, but once I cleared the first hundred pages it quickly became a fast-paced and addicting read...that is when it wasn't being bogged down by overly-metaphorical prose. When Mafi left the metaphors out and focused on dialogue or describing action, the story flowed much better and finally held my attention.

The world-building of Shatter Me felt a bit shaky at times--I was never quite sure if the story was meant to be set in an alternative present day or in the future. Juliette's descriptions of the world before the Reestablishment don't always match up. From her memories, life before the Reestablishment seems fairly ordinary: people drove cars, went to school, celebrated holidays. And yet:

There aren't as many trees as there were before, is what the scientists say. They say our world used to be green. Our clouds used to be white. Our sun was always the right kind of light. But I have very faint memories of that world.

On top of that, she's only "heard stories" about flying birds. All of this left me to question: was the environment already in trouble when Juliette was young, and people just went on living as usual despite it? Or is the ambiguity of Juliette's recollections of her world meant to showcase her alleged insanity? And that's not the only unsolved mystery of the book. Mafi poses so many questions that are never answered. What is the significance of Adam's bird tattoo? Why does it match the bird from Juliette's dreams? Why can Adam touch Juliette but no one else can? Why is that when Juliette and Adam make their escape she is suddenly susceptible to Warner's warnings, despite being completely wary of him before? Perhaps these are things that will be explained in the rest of the trilogy, but I wish we'd gotten a little more explanation in this volume.

Despite my misgivings about the world-building and writing style, the one thing that kept me reading was the relationship between Juliette and Adam. It was very sweet, the only point of light in an otherwise bleak dystopian world. However, by the latter third of the book, I could sense the beginning of a love triangle forming and was none too happy about it. Warner is such a despicable character--power-hungry and sadistic--that I really couldn't fathom how Juliette could even think about things such as his supposed good looks. I have a nagging feeling that Unravel Me is headed in a direction I really don't want it to go, as far as the relationship between these two is concerned.

Overall, I'm a bit conflicted about Shatter Me. On the one hand, it wasn't ever so bad that I considered shelving it as a DNF. I truly did enjoy reading about Juliette and Adam, and the last half of the book was pretty exciting. On the other hand, I found a lot elements (the prose, the world-building, Juliette's relationship with Warner) to be problematic. I'll be continuing the series with Unravel Me but depending on where Mafi takes Juliette and Warner's relationship, it will probably be a make-or-break read for me.