Essay Bundle: How Romance Books Can Be Impactful

Analyzing Juliette Ferrars Pt.3

Ignite Me is such an important book for the Shatter Me series for numerous reasons. The first one I'd like to chat about is more of a fun fact than anything. When Tahereh Mafi set out to write Shatter Me, it was originally a trilogy. I'm assuming as she was writing it she started to realize that there was more plot to be written and so she had to change that idea but I'm not her, so I could be wrong.

Despite the box set having all six books and all five (physically speaking, three) novellas it's been divided up into two trilogies in: the Shatter Me trilogy and the Restore Me trilogy. This may seem a little odd until you look at the structuring of the series as a whole.

See, trilogies commonly have a specific structure so that the overall plot can be explored and carried out in an impactful and easy to understand way. The first book of the trilogy is the exposition. Once you get to the final book you can see that the plot in the first book was more simple and had a much smaller scale. It contributed to the overall plot, but it was very clearly a little rush of conflict so the reader can get to know the world and characters. And then there's the middle book, which is like the exposition in a different way. It introduces us to the bigger scale plot and sometimes can feel like a mirage of scenes stitched together to get you from point A to point B. The middle book can sometimes be nothing more than a bridge between that baby plot and the boss battle that is the final book, where we get our big plot, tied up strings, and some level of closure.

Ignite Me is clearly the final book of a trilogy. First off, I'm not going to mention plot much in this, I will be examining that after character analyzation, but this is the book where we get the "final battle" vibes the most, but the main reason why it's the final book of the trilogy is because it's the end of Juliette's character arc.

Juliette has a very well done character arc in my opinion, because we see her at her pitiful beginning, kind of doing ok, then see her at the absolute worst, and then in Ignite Me she's still very distinctly that tempered, generous girl we met on page one of the series, but she grew and matured.

I will say it definitely is her near death that does the change more than anything, but either way Ignite Me starts in a very eerie sense of coming full circle. The beginning interaction she has with Aaron just so creepily takes you back to Shatter Me with them going back and forth, squabbling. The sense that it was written to be like that is only pushed on us further when we get Aaron talking about what the first book was like in his point of view.

What I love about Ignite Me's writing is definitely the flow of it. Right off the bat, the plot picks up by Aaron telling Juliette about Omega Point's destruction and not only does it start up the action plot but it also shows how Juliette has matured while still being herself.

She reacts in what we know is a very Juliette way, in fact, we've seen similar scenarios already with less grave circumstances in both Shatter Me and Unravel Me. What's different about it is Juliette lets herself grieve, but then finally has the stable strength to stand up and move on to try to fix the problem. Not only was she able to snap out of the feeling to crumble and whither away on the floor, she becomes fidgety when she can't immediately act on her desire to fix things. She also lets herself feel her anger, which is a topic that has been explored since book one but this is the first time we see her actually eager to carry out vengeance and use her anger as a tool to help her.

Throughout the book we get to see her as the heroine that saves society and the caring and genuinely good person who just wants her friends to be ok and happy, a detail that impacts her harder than anything given how she never had that before Aaron got her out of the asylum.

Quite a few scenes that really let us see her character growth are scenes where we experience Adam's character regression, which is honestly a really sad thing to think about but I'll dive deeper in Adam's side of things later. Those scenes, as well as when she's telling the remaining members of Omega Point why she is now more desperate than ever to kill Anderson, is when we get a full, clean list of reasons for the why of all of her character growth. I personally love her scene with Kenji the best, though. "I remember it so well." She says to Kenji on page 88, "Dying. It was the most painful thing I've ever experienced. I couldn't scream because my lungs were torn apart or full of blood. I don't know. I just had to lie there, trying to breathe, hoping to drop dead as quickly as possible. And the whole time I kept thinking about how I'd spent my entire life being a coward, and how it got me nowhere. And I knew that if I had the chance to do it all again, I'd do it differently. I promised myself I'd finally stop being afraid."

Another quote I want to call attention to is when Juliette gets angry while training with Kenji later in the book, on page 244 and 245:

"You don't know what I used to be like. You don't know what it was like in my head. I lived in a really dark place. I wasn't safe in my own mind. I woke up every morning hoping to die and then spent the rest of the day wondering if maybe I was already dead because I didn't know the difference."

"Don't you think I've realized that if I'd allowed myself to get mad a long time ago, I would've discovered I had the strength to break through the asylum with my own bare hands? Don't you think it kills me to know that it was my own unwillingness to recognize myself as a human being that kept me trapped for so long?"

This moment in the books made me shiver so bad when I read it, because this scene was Juliette acknowledging her own faults and her own trauma in the purest form. She didn't just see herself as the victim she was like she did in Unravel Me and Shatter Me, she outright said that if only she had a better mental space, if only she didn't let all of the hatred she got for existing become her own self-hatred. It truly is such an impactful scene for measuring just how much she's been able to overcome and how much she's been able to heal herself.

I always say Ignite Me is my favorite book of the series because we get re-meet the Juliette we saw in the first book and we get to see her reach her full potential. She's smart, she's determined, she's driven. She knows she wants to better the world and help those she loves and she does everything she can to do so. This is the book in the series where you go "oh, it's not just a dystopian novel," or "oh, it's not just a YA romance girls blush at," It's a story containing a individual vs. self plot that handles the themes of healing from trauma and self-forgiveness and it does it well.