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.
I am a review junkie.
Not just writing them, but reading them as well. In fact, about ninety percent of my reading
choices are determined by reviews, most of the other ten by e-ARCS or indie
requests. But when I saw Shatter Me pop up in my GR feed, with
that absolutely stunning paperback cover and hooking synopsis, I didn’t even
check reviews. I just added it to my
must-have TBR list, confident I’d love it.
My favorite GR reviewers weren’t so thrilled by this novel, and after
reading it myself, I’m reminded yet again why I put so much faith in their
judgment.
It’s because they’re usually right. Like with
Shatter Me.
I have so many issues with this book that I don’t even know
where to start, and such a weight of disappointment pressing down on my bookish
heart that I don’t really want to. But
of course, I’m going to get my masochist on and do it anyway.
First of all, the characters were a mess. Seriously.
All over the place. Juliette
especially was a total frigging train-wreck, and not in the intended mentally
instable, lonely way. First of all, the
chick acts damn useless considering her hands are literally a lethal
weapon. She lets Adam do most of the
work while she whines about how scared she is and how unhappy she is and how
much she wants Adam to touch her. In
fact, most of her thoughts are based around a guy’s hotness. What does she do while running for her life? Stops to fantasize about kissing Adam. Creepy sadistic total a-hole Warner
threatening the man she “loves” is the perfect time to notice the gloriousness
of his body and redness of his lips and beauty of his eyes. Like, are you freaking kidding me? I’m not even
going to get into the textbook case of insta-love because the other issues with
the “romance” in this book were just so much more horrendous.
Which brings me to the boys of Shatter Me, Adam and Warner.
Adam is such a Good Guy that it begins to get a bit nauseating, while
Warner is just about the best example of an evil villain I can think of. And yet, Unravel
Me promises a love triangle between Juliette and those two. Um…how? Warner isn’t even a “bad boy”, he’s a
trigger-happy sociopath with too much power.
But wait, I forgot. It’s Juliette
we’re talking about. His pale green eyes
and rock-hard body are so much more important than that time he tried to kill
her boyfriend.
The actual story is the most contrived, predictable thing
you can imagine. It is impossible to
overstate this. Nothing, nothing,
shocking happens in this book. If you
have read a single dystopian novel in your life, you’ve read the plot for Shatter Me. Which in itself is almost impressive,
considering how unique the book seems after reading the synopsis. The character interactions are numerous and
repetitive, consisting of Juliette and Adam confessing their love to each other
and remembering their school days a half dozen times, and Warner asking
Juliette to touch him while Juliette notes how evil and sexy he is another half
dozen times. It does a really crappy job
of masking the fact that a couple hundred pages go by in the middle without
anything really happening, and by the time it does pick up for the ending, I
was so frustrated with the rest of the book that I didn’t even really care.
There were a few very small good things about this
book. Firstly, the writing style. So many people complain about it, but
personally, it was actually the only thing that made it stand out even a tiny
bit for me. Sure, there were a few too
many bad metaphors, a few choppy paragraphs, but for the most part the
unconventional prose added the only real depth this story has. The first fifty to a hundred pages weren’t
utter crap. Things actually happened,
Juliette was actually interesting, and Adam wasn’t a total cliché of a love
interest yet. But the rest of the book
was just so god-awful that the strengths of the beginning exist in my mind as
nothing more than a short note in my notebook.
Originally, I was going to rate this book 2.5 stars, but
after reliving the novel through this review, it doesn’t even deserve
that. I’m going to be generous and give
this one 2 stars. Disappointed doesn’t
even begin to describe how I’m feeling right now, considering how high my hopes
had been going in to this one.
Shatter Me - 2 out of 5 stars
This is going to sound awful, but I'm so happy to have found someone else who disliked this book! It seems like almost all of the bloggers I follow loved the romance so much, they were able to set aside every other issue.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I could probably get behind this series if Juliette grew a backbone. Unfortunately, it's more of the same in Unravel Me.
You evil person! Nah, just kidding. I'm a bit of a book sadist, too. Love seeing someone with the same unpopular book opinion as me haha.
DeleteI don't know if I'd love it if Juliette weren't such a horrible protagonist, but I definitely wouldn't have hated it so much. She was just awful! Chick can stop her captors with a single touch, and she cowers behind Adam while she fantasizes about him and the guy chasing them. Like, come on! Who does that? Without a doubt, she's what ruined the story for me. Ugh.
Thanks for the Unravel Me warning. I was thinking about maybe possibly giving it a shot, but I should probably let this series die in my mind and focus on the better books on my TBR list.