Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1)

I may be a little optimistic, or a total softie, but I think that Shatter Me is great in concept and ambitious in vision. It's just very poorly executed. There have been a handful of books that I've read in the past couple of years that I was rather alarmed that they actually made it to book shelves in the state they're in. This is definitely one of them.Mafi invents a character - the painfully isolated Juliette Ferrars, a girl with a lethal touch - but very little else. Shatter Me is only a dystopian in the sense that stuff is just bad, ok, and then some guys called The Reestablishment somehow convinced everyone to leave behind everything they believe in and everything that makes them who they are based on a flimsy promise to make things better. Typically an absence of conviction or belief is not what gets the world into messes like this.Pretty much everyone has put in their two cents about the prose styling, so I'll get that out of the way: It didn't bother me that much, not directly. Aesthetically, its rather pleasing, but I think it hampered a lot of the important elements of the story. Yes, Mafi is definitely trying way too hard, and being that she's a young debut author I'm not begrudging her much for it. The main issue is that the prose was just not grounded. While verbose, it wasn't actually descriptive because often times it wasn't actually describing anything. It's not evocative, as my college poetry professor would say. It didn't make me feel anything.And sometimes it actually conflicted with the action. The page was so filled up with metaphors that I actually had a hard time discerning what was going on. Actually, the action itself was often confusing – she sits up when she had already sat up a couple paragraphs ago, he grabs her shoulders when I thought he was sitting across the table from her. Moments like this kept up on popping up and it made it impossible to fully get engrossed in the story.Generally, everyone's motivations and actions had me scratching my head. Everything is so cartoonish and over the top, every time Adam melodramatically confesses his love or Juliette gasps for no apparent reason I couldn't even roll my eyes it was just so bewildering. I know this is an extreme situation and they're young and impulsive or something, but who in the hell are these people?The only thing that really made sense in this context was Warner. In this strange fairytale world of flimsy world building and melodrama, Warner was exactly the flourishing, rabid villain that was needed. It was like he knew the type of role he was supposed to play and did it with mouth-frothing enthusiasm. Even so, Warner, like Adam and Juliette, had very little opportunity to actually show what he's made of. There's a lot of explaining of who these characters are, but very little showing. Adam has to tell us about what a good person Juliette is, he also tells about Warner's mommy issues (there is an attempt to display this organically, it's awful, like laughably awful). The only visceral, emotional thing that Shatter Me was good at evoking was lust. Compared to most YA that simply talks about “electricity” between two characters, Shatter Me is downright erotic. Adam and Juliette go at each other pretty enthusiastically, and without much sentiment or scruples. Being that this is a story based around the ability to touch, sexuality has a really big part. However, it also led to a really big problem I had with the story, and a rather curious element that I'm not sure was intentional or not on Mafi's part.Juliette is referred to as an object so many times I started keeping track. And then I lost track. My body is a carnivorous flower, a poisonous houseplant, a loaded gun with a million triggers and he's more than ready to fire.Ha, objectification as well as sexual connotation. Here's a prime example from Warner himself -“It's very fortunate you're not battery operated.”He may try to delude himself about it later, but Warner wants her to be the object to his subject, the weapon for his movement, even though he may dress it up as a means of empowering her (he may even believe it himself, which is one of things that makes him interesting to me). However, things don't get any better with Adam. Almost every time he and Juliette make contact, it's him touching her. And the prose is so intense, so violent that, to put it bluntly, it read like he was molesting her. He's everywhere up my back and over my arms and suddenly he's kissing me harder, deeper, with a fervent urgent need I've never known before. He breaks for air only to bury his lips in my neck, along my collarbone up my chin and cheeks and I'm gasping for oxygen and he's destroying me with his hands and we're drenched in water and beauty and the exhilaration of a moment I never knew was possible.I've been going through a process of making myself more aware of the fetishization of dominance in our culture, and how it is not as natural as we're led to believe. It may be just that my education has come to a point where I no longer enjoy these kinds of things like I used to, but honestly I think Shatter Me is just a glaring example. It's embedded in the very language that Mafi uses, it's in the freaking title itself. But I'm going to try to stop myself before this review gets out of a hand, because I want to write about this more at length once I read [b:Destroy Me 13623150 Destroy Me (Shatter Me, #1.5) Tahereh Mafi http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1340398466s/13623150.jpg 19226840]. (Oh hey, look, I did.)I will say that I think Juliette's sexuality is an important element in this novel, because it is inextricably linked to her ability. Her relationship to touch defines how she engages with other people and how strongly her bonds develop with them. It's hard to believe that an ordinary woman would feel such sudden sexual tension with these two men, but in the context of Juliette who can only touch no one but these two men it makes a bit more sense. It seems convenient for story telling purposes that her two love interest are touchable, but really we should be looking at it the other way around. They are love interests because they're touchable.However, I think Mafi was not entirely complete, for a lack of a better term, in expanding on Juliette's relationship to touch. Here is another instance where the metaphors got in the way. In order to properly express how Juliette feels about essentially losing one of her five senses, the description has to be grounded, it has to be represented by words that the reader can relate to, because touch, particularly the ability to touch other people, is a huge part of how we relate to the world. I think Mafi got a little carried away with the cerebral nature of Juliette's instability and didn't take enough time with the physical.Perhaps it's because this is a young adult book, which leads me to think again that this concept was just too big for this type of story. Juliette's sexuality is a huge part of making this portrait fuller, and the ability to flesh that out might have been hampered by the target age group. I think a big part of Juliette's development and the progression of the story as a whole is going to rely on Juliette finding agency (sexual and otherwise), and learning to flip herself from object to subject, and that is something that will come down to not just her actions and roles, but the language used to describe her.So in my strange and muddied conclusion, I guess I believe in this story and I believe in Mafi. I think there's oodles of potential here, it just was not remotely realized. There's a really big opportunity here to say something about women's agency and sexuality and I have my fingers crossed that Mafi will take it and run with it.