So. It is the future and things are bad and Juliette is locked in a cell because she is a MONSTER and you will hear a lot about this, about how much she sucks, because it is the overarching theme of the book. (Spoiler: she kills people with her touch, and once accidentally killed a toddler [whose mother was the baddest, laziest mother in the world which is why Juliette had to help the toddler up {thereby killing him}so you could argue that it was the bad, lazy mother's fault he died {incidentally, Juliette's mother is also the baddest. Everyone in this book is either the MOST EVILEST or Shining Perfection With Hot Abs Also}].)
I have totally lost my train of...oh right. So suddenly a BOY gets locked in her cell with her and they are both like *snarl but then swoony like woah, accelerating the plot of 50% of novels by about a thousand* and it turns out that he is her childhood defender, except they haven't seen each other in three years and they both are like MAYBE S/HE DOESN'T RECOGNIZE ME and I am like, Three years is not that long, compadres. You don't totally face-morph between fourteen and seventeen.
Anybarf, the one boy who was kind to her as a child and whose arms she finds swoony is also her own special snowflake who can touch her without DYING in AGONY. Unless we mean the sexxxxxual kind, because they do a lot of agonized touching. Sets the skin on fire, ignites the bones. YOU KNOW THE KIND.
So they make secret googly eyes, but then it turns out that he's a foot soldier for the Big Baddie (what's a FutureBadTimes novel without a Big Baddie, I ask you) who is only 19 and also warm for Juliette's form. And she is all like WHY IS EVERYONE SO IN LOVE WITH ME I AM A MONSTER WHO HASN'T LOOKED IN A MIRROR IN THREE YEARS and then she DOES and is like, Ugh, 'my lips are too pink' and 'my teeth are unusually straight.' She's probably too tall and too thin with eyes some hideous shade of aqua-marine as well.
And after the obligatory You betrayed me by pretending to be not a foot soldier argument, Juliette agrees to run away with the foot soldier (whom we will start calling Adam, since that is his name) and they continue to sneak canoodles and belabour the merits of their relationship. And every time she is like But how could you possibly care about me? I hear echoes of But why male models? and this is one of my many (MANY) beefs with instalove, that one of the characters is always like, But how could you come to love worthless nothing me? and I am like YES, HOW? Because you are both sort of the worst.
And then they run away and escape to the secret underground where other people with Super! Powers! like Juliette's are staging a resistance to the Big Baddie and His Hoard, and, as though they could hear me shouting, one of them is all IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT ADAM CAN TOUCH YOU WITHOUT DYING NO COINCIDENCE AT ALL and I am like, Good, but I will not be reading the next book to find out the Reason, because this is where Shatter Me ends, with Juliette finding acceptance at last. OUR BODIES, OURSELVES!
So there's that. But there is also the writing oh my god the writing. It needs to be pared down. And not pared down like Hemmingway, but pared down like look at your sentences in the mirror before you leave the house and take off one redundant description of self-loathing. And then maybe like five adjectives.
Some ejemplos: 'His eyes scanned the silhouette of my structure.' You mean, like, your body, right? Thesaurusii are a double-edged sword. (This is before I realized that she refers to her body as her 'sillouette' only when she's not referring to it as her 'structure' or her 'frame' and I am like YARRRRGH.) 'I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence.' Wait, what? 'An ache mars the features of his finely chiseled face.' I think we have had QUITE ENOUGH of finely-chiseled faces. Also crooked grins. I call for a moratorium on crooked grins.
And this is all from the first fifteen pages or so and I'm thinking, Man, it goes on and on like this, and it took me probably seven chapters to realize that these sorts of verbal shenanigans didn't crop up frequently on the page, they WERE the page. It's like when you make chocolate-chip cookies but with just enough cookie to kind of hold the chocolate chips together so that they're BASICALLY cookie-shaped slabs of chocolate. But if chocolate were overwrought, overladen text, and not really tasty.
And that's before she's all, 'The natural elements were at war with each other because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man.' It's at this point that I dm'd TY all, Shatter Me is trying to make me feel bad about not recycling.
And at some point a guy says something and she is like Touché, and he is like, Oh, you're French? And this question has NO BEARING on the conversation and is never referred to again, it's just a weird, incomprehensible exchange to fill space.
I'm not even going to touch on the crossed-out bits of text, except to say that they have the effect of being likeMOAR ANGST MOAR ANGST MOAR ANGST. Like, I am trying to restrain myself but the ANGST IT ESCAPES ANYWAY.
In short,
Some ejemplos: 'His eyes scanned the silhouette of my structure.' You mean, like, your body, right? Thesaurusii are a double-edged sword. (This is before I realized that she refers to her body as her 'sillouette' only when she's not referring to it as her 'structure' or her 'frame' and I am like YARRRRGH.) 'I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence.' Wait, what? 'An ache mars the features of his finely chiseled face.' I think we have had QUITE ENOUGH of finely-chiseled faces. Also crooked grins. I call for a moratorium on crooked grins.
And this is all from the first fifteen pages or so and I'm thinking, Man, it goes on and on like this, and it took me probably seven chapters to realize that these sorts of verbal shenanigans didn't crop up frequently on the page, they WERE the page. It's like when you make chocolate-chip cookies but with just enough cookie to kind of hold the chocolate chips together so that they're BASICALLY cookie-shaped slabs of chocolate. But if chocolate were overwrought, overladen text, and not really tasty.
And that's before she's all, 'The natural elements were at war with each other because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man.' It's at this point that I dm'd TY all, Shatter Me is trying to make me feel bad about not recycling.
And at some point a guy says something and she is like Touché, and he is like, Oh, you're French? And this question has NO BEARING on the conversation and is never referred to again, it's just a weird, incomprehensible exchange to fill space.
I'm not even going to touch on the crossed-out bits of text, except to say that they have the effect of being like
In short,
















