I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”īut when Juliette finds out that miraculously there are those who can touch her (maybe those that feel love toward her?), she is reborn:
My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. “I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history I experienced adolescence by association. The only relationships she could have were with characters in books: Because Juliette has not been able to touch anyone or be touched her whole life, she has been avoided and reviled, and is starving for affection and the touch of another human being. In addition, this story employs a most interesting trope. In my opinion, Mafi’s use of sensorial allusions lends an enhanced tonal range to her words, and thus helps breach the gap between the reader and the text, and expand the limitations of textual realism. Is there any question what she means? And is there any question that her manner of describing what happened conveys more than verisimilitude would do? Straight narrative would neutralize the depiction the aesthetic montage of this scene evokes the emotion and intensity of the moment.
Shatter me book full#
… I’ve searched the world for all the right words and my mouth is full of nothing.”
Shatter me book skin#
… His lips are spelling secrets and my ears are spilling ink, staining my skin with his stories. Changes his mind a million times until his words tumble through the air between us. “His eyes are full of pain like I’ve never seen them before. Take this example, describing when Adam is confiding something to Juliette: In Shatter Me, the voice comes from the writing in a girl’s diary, so I have no objection to the occasional use of poetic images, exaggeration, or incomplete thoughts to reflect the actual way Juliette is thinking. The reason is that, if the voice in a book is that of an omniscient narrator, then I have an expectation of being able to derive understanding from a rational interpretation of the sentences. You may possibly recall that in the past I have complained about authors whose language is pretty at the expense of meaning. The dynamic among the three of them intensifies, and the dangers rocket out of control.ĭiscussion: Because this book is in the form of Juliette’s diary, the text appears as if it consists of actual entries, including cross-outs, stream of consciousness, and many metaphorical expressions of feelings. Warner tells Juliette he wants her to perform torture for him, and assigns Adam to guard her. Her roommate is not another female, however, but a male, one who is disarmingly handsome, and furthermore, one that she knows.īefore long, the two prisoners, Juliette and Adam, are brought before Warner, the cruel leader of their district. But the main reason is that her own parents turned her in as “a freak of nature.”Īs the story begins, Juliette has been in solitary confinement for 264 days, and she has just been told she is getting a roommate. Once, when overcome by a desire to help a little boy, without forethought she picked him up with fatal effect, and that is in part why she is incarcerated. In Juliette’s case, if she touches anyone, that person will die.
In this future scenario, the ecosystem has become severely distorted by human abuse, and one of the effects is that some people have developed “special abilities” that are not normal. But, as with most dystopias, the new group in control has become drunk on power and despotic. The story is told in the form of entries in the diary of Juliette Ferrars, a 17-year-old who has been imprisoned by “The Reestablishment,” the government faction that is supposed to renew the dying society. This is a young adult dystopia that readers either love or hate (I explain why under Discussion, below), and I’m totally in the “I loved it” camp.
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