Shatter Me

By: Tahereh Mafi

Narrated by: Kate Simses

The gripping first installment in New York Times bestselling author Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me series.

One touch is all it takes. One touch, and Juliette Ferrars can leave a fully grown man gasping for air. One touch, and she can kill.

No one knows why Juliette has such incredible power. It feels like a curse, a burden that one person alone could never bear. But The Reestablishment sees it as a gift, sees her as an opportunity. An opportunity for a deadly weapon.

Juliette has never fought for herself before. But when she’s reunited with the one person who ever cared about her, she finds a strength she never knew she had.

And don’t miss Defy Me, the shocking fifth book in the Shatter Me series!

Strong Ending but First 3/4 of Book Drove Me Crazy

Shatter Me is another 3-star dystopian novel that I read on the heels of Station Eleven. Whereas Station Eleven is a literary dystopian tale aimed at an adult audience, this is a young adult novel along the lines of Divergent. I was pleased with the promising ending, but was pretty irritated by the writing in the first three-quarters of the book. Imagine an entire novel written in the style of slam poetry with bunches of repetitive...repetitive...repetitive phrases and multitudes of over-the-top descriptions ("There are 400 cotton balls caught in my windpipe.") Fortunately, the author abandoned this writing style in the final stretch of the novel. Only then did it feel like she had finally settled into her skin, and was ready to give us the story we had all been waiting for. Because of the strong ending, I'm actually interested in the next two books in the trilogy.

Great Narrator

I have listened to this narrator before in the Matched series and found her blank and monotone sounding but in this book she is fantastic! I love her male voices and the emotion she conveys through the main character. I would have liked there to be more dialogue development before the main characters fell in love with each other however. It just seems a little over the top because we weren't able to see them learn about each others lives too much to see their connection. I like the ending for this story. It sets it up very nicely for a dystopian world.

Couldn't continue as audiobook, may try in print

I wish I had read more reviews. I am sure the story is good, I heard great things from the bookstagram and it was shaping up to be fairly enjoyable, but after an hour pushing through I couldn't take the scratching sounds and repetitive inner dialogue/journaling anymore. They were just too jarring via audio for me. I wish I could return the audiobook to get my credit back and just read it on paper in peace.

Whiney 17 year old

There are a lot of descriptives used to get across one emotion, it's excessive & unnecessary. The voice of the main character is whiney & high pitched. This grates on the nerves within the first hour.

Interesting & Dramatic

Well....this definitely was not what I was expecting but I'm not mad about it. I don't usually read books about worlds ending and wars going on but this one had a supernatural twist so I had to at least try it. It seems to start off kind of slow and you will feel completely in the dark for the first half of the book but there is much to follow so hang in there. I would have liked to know much more about how their world ended up this way but I'm only one book down so we shall see.
As far as the narrator, I think Kate did a great job with all of the characters she had to read. Juliet is a smidge over the top dramatic, especially in the beginning, and I know this character is having a very rough time so far so I understand some of the dramatics but there are some scenarios that didn't need the yelling whinny voice. Ignore that and you should make it through just fine.
I'm curious as to where the story is going to go since there are so many more books in this series. I'm purchasing book 2!