Friday, January 6, 2012

Book Recommendation: Shatter Me

For New Years, my husband and I spent the weekend with a group of our friends. While the boys played video games, I looked through our friend's bookshelf and was delighted to find a pristine copy of Tahereh Mafi's Shatter Me (and an ARC no less). Around 8pm Friday night I began reading it, intending to savor it over the course of the weekend. By 1:30am I had finished it.

Shatter Me has done well in the month or two it's been out, which is unsurprising. The story is a mix of trends that are currently popular: one part post-apocalyptic, two parts romance, three parts superhero, with a dash of mild psychosis like peppermint in a chocolate chip cookie. Tahereh Mafi is a popular figure on twitter and tumblr, and for good reason—she knows how to be charming and inspiring and make her followers feel included in her successes. So I expected to enjoy my immersion into the world of her story.

What I didn't expect was to sink deeper and deeper into her imagery. I don't remember reading a single cliché in any of the 300 or so pages. The main character Juliette is multidimensional because she's packed full of uniquely-worded thoughts, so full in fact that she's dripping with phrases I wanted to pluck out of the book, prop on my shelf and rub for good luck every time I pass. The book left me saturated with the feeling that I had learned something new about how words might be used.

I know that not everyone will enjoy the writing style in the book. For some it might be a bit overpowering. But personally I'm glad that I didn't let this book pass by as “just another post-apoc novel.”

4 comments:

  1. Sounds really interesting. :-) My reading list is getting longer and longer, but at some point I hope to catch up. Maybe I'll add this one.

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  2. Interesting--I might check it out. I have to read Hunger Games first!

    Btw--you need to check out amazon affiliates. If you add those links into your blog when you send people to amazon to check out the book you are recommending you can get a portion of what the sales price is. Just check it out!

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  3. Yes! You do have to read The Hunger Games.

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