Essay Bundle: How Romance Books Can Be Impactful

A Book Analysis: Shatter Me By Tahereh Mafi

Please Note: Spoiler alerts will be very common, so if you actually would like to read the book and be fully surprised by everything, maybe don't read this just yet. Then again, if you aren't a fan of romance and don't want to read the books I talk about, I would love for you to read this and see the other aspects of this book anyway if only because I find it interesting.

Shatter Me was one of the first romance books I ever read and is the only dystopian series I like, so I guess I'm trying to say It holds a really special place in me. Shout to my cousin for forcing me to buy it, as well. I was really on the fence about it.

Shatter Me has six books and five novellas, so I may have to make this a series of sorts to fully cover everything. Of course, this one will be about the most important thing about the book: Juliette Ferrars.

"I've been locked up for 264 days." Is the first sentence of Shatter Me. The first two pages are about where she is. Juliette Ferrars, age seventeen, lives in a dystopian version of the world, and is most likely in America, though we only know she is in North America as a continent and is near the ocean. Juliette was born with the power of lethal touch, which we learn in Ignite Me actually is more of an insane amount of strength that is able to manifest in different ways. The powers themselves didn't appear until Juliette was a little older, I believe around eight, though it's only mentioned a few times and I'm blanking on what book it is that we get her full story. The first sentence refers to how, nearly a year before the start of the book, her parents finally were able to discard her, throwing her into the insane asylum.

I think it's actually amazing how Juliette immediately is portrayed in a way where you know her instantly. Reading the first page alone, you can feel how there are two sides of her: the self-loathing, monster-infested girl who has lost hope in both herself and world, and the gentle, caring girl who manifests hope into her very being, refusing to fall into that dark headspace she so easily could drown in.

On page two we finally hear her speak. "You're a b-b-b-b-" is the first thing she says to our lovely first love interest and plot device for the initiating event, Adam Kent. The first seven chapters of Shatter Me are so interesting because even though It's written in first person, you feel like you're studying Juliette like her parents do: As if she's some experiment, discarded and left to spoil.

Nothing happens action wise, but in-between the subtle expositions to tell the reader about what the world is like, we only see Juliette as her "younger self". She's timid all the time around her new cellmate, teetering the line between normal and insane so delicately. You can tell she would have been such a fun, sweet girl were it no for her ability to kill anyone just by having her bare skin brush against theirs.

The most intriguing thing about Juliette in those early chapters besides her predicament is that her awful childhood clearly left its mark on her. Instead of trying to confide in Adam, or at least talk to him, she instead writes in her nearly full journal that she stole from a doctor before she was locked up in the asylum. It also was revealed on page one that she learned to become obsessed with numbers. She frequently counts things. The bricks in the wall, the lines on her palms, the breaths she takes. Though she hasn't done any self-harm or acted on suicidal thoughts, it is revealed through her journal entrees that she sometimes has them.

In chapter eight we truly get to know her though. When Aaron Warner is introduced, or simply Warner in the first book, we see her true personality. She's the innocent cutie we've seen her be so far. . .just also with a temper.

Aaron Warner works for the corrupt government that rules the world, and he forcefully takes her to his own base to use her powers as a weapon for the government's cruel needs.

The rest of Shatter Me Juliette stays the same girl she was in chapter eight, though in her scenes with Aaron, she allows herself to be angry and express her emotions. What so many people in the Shatter Me fandom never give her enough credit for is even though sometimes she acts more like a shell of a person, other times like an angry carnival animal that's been caged for too long, Juliette still is a very humane person at her core. Something that Aaron noted in his own Novella, Destroy Me, when he recalls how Juliette would only sit and stare at things, sometimes count out loud, and would shower regularly, even as the other inmates in the asylum did self-harm or were truly delusional, having passionate conversations with themselves.

The only change in personality Juliette has in Shatter Me is the slow revealing of her vulnerable sides, first her anger with Aaron, and then her trampled spirit and the effects her trauma has on her through her romance plot with Adam.

As Shatter Me ends in the promising cliffhanger of Juliette and Adam running away from Aaron, along with a character we meet towards the end of the book, Kenji Kishimoto, who leads them to the rebel group he's part of, long time Shatter Me fans will suggest you read Destroy Me. The first of two novella's in Aaron's POV. As Aaron's character will be explored in the next article I write, I will not focus too much on it, though we get to understand more of Juliette's past through her journal in there.

Juliette had normal parents who quickly became abusive and neglectful towards her when they realized she had her lethal touch. It's implied that it was a fairly common occurrence, this abuse, but in her journal, Juliette wrote about a particularly bad experience regarding her mother:

"There was something about my face, she said, that she couldn't stand. Something about my eyes, the way I look at her, the fact that I even existed. She'd always tell me to stop looking at her. She'd always scream it. Like I might attack her. Stop looking at me, she'd scream. You just stop looking at me, she'd scream. She put my hand in the fire once. Just to see if it would burn, she said. Just to check if it was a regular hand, she'd said. I was six years old then. I remember because it was my birthday." -Page 51.

If I continue any further this will be a little bit too long so I will end this segment here and next article will be talking about her character development through Unravel Me and Ignite Me. Shatter Me is a very interesting format for that reason, actually. By the time you read Restore Me, it becomes especially clear that Shatter Me is almost like a prequel. She truly doesn't have a character arc until Unravel Me, Tahereh Mafi seeming to choose getting to know her as the victimized teenager before we get to see her as a person.