9/19/2023 0 Comments Shatter me main characters![]() Along the way she will have to see the world in shades of gray and be willing to forgive and understand that people are not just for or against the way things, are, that sometimes you just have to do things to survive and protect the ones you love. Adam was playing a role, and now Juliette will have to play one in a world where the food is fake, the clouds the wrong color, and artifacts of culture and life before it all fell apart are destroyed and deemed illegal. Warner, another teen, is in charge of a soldiers in the Reestablishment and has been following Juliette for a long time trying to see how they can weaponize her and use her for their cause. Adam is a soldier and can touch her, he is also planted to learn about her as part of his job. Her parents, along with everyone else, have always feared her, and not being hugged or touched her whole life has definitely been a painful existence for her. Juliette can kill people with her touch and apparently has killed someone, a child. As he asks her questions we learn a bit about her power and the state of the world. She is then joined by a male cellmate, Adam, one she slowly realizes she remembers from her youth and is in love with. The book starts with Juliette counting how many days she has been locked up in a cell, 264, void of human interaction of any sort and hinting at the reason her parents feared her and turned her in. It is an AR 4.3, but the language, violence, and romantic build ups should not be read by 4th graders. If this was a show pilot, however, I would let Netflix automatically start the next episode until I had binge watched the entire season, not necessarily because the story is great, or the characters amazing, or the writing stellar, but because it is easy and fun and you really want to suspend belief and know who all these attractive mutated teens running a broken world are, and yes you will roll your eyes at the syrupy sweet lust filled pages, but it is YA so maybe I’m just overly cynical and 15 year olds and up will enjoy it. That being said, I am on the fence about reading the rest of the series, as this is the start of a six book series, with two “half” novellas interjected in and being told from other characters’ perspectives. It is more a lot of self loathing, desire, and anger. ![]() That isn’t to say the book is bad, just that it isn’t as high action, or reform-a-broken-world, or even use-my-super-powers-to-save-myself-and-those-around-me as I had hoped. It’s a great learning tool as a fellow writer to see what works and what doesn’t, especially as we may end up cutting what we think our first pages will be.In many ways this 338 page dystopian YA fiction book focuses more on romance than the super human powers the 17 year old protagonist has and the role she will play in the resistance. Some of the novels are ones I’ve read before, but I enjoy doing a ‘true’ first pages critique like here for Shatter Me, in which I don’t know anything about the book so I’m truly seeing if the first pages are strong enough to make me keep reading. To check out other books in our First Pages series, click here. I included the sneak peek excerpt at the front of the novel as well in the images above, because it’s just as enticing as the first pages. I’m looking finding out more and getting hooked on this series too. Somehow it works for this voice, this character, this series. ![]() I love the crossed-out sections of her true thoughts, instead of just writing them italicized. I love the images of leaves having wings, wings that Juliette is likely dreaming of having herself. Juliette’s point of view features crossed-off thoughts, as well as lyrically beautiful imagery. Yikes!Īt this point, we don’t know why Juliette has been kept prisoner, and we don’t know why, after 264 days of isolation, she gets a cellmate. She starts Shatter Me with an imprisoned main character, Juliette, who happens to get a cellmate in the first chapter. And Mafi just did a cover reveal this week of Defy Me, the fifth book in the series, which will be released in April. ![]() Since we are doing a read-along of Tahereh Mafi’s A Very Large Expanse of Sea, I’ve been curious about her bestselling fantasy/adventure/YA romance series that starts with Shatter Me, especially as Mini Me has been reading the trilogy over and over again.
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