Ridiculously Bad, What a Trainwreck: Shatter Me by Tehereh Mafi [REVIEW]

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
First published in November 2011 by HarperCollins
Tags: Young Adult, Dystopia, Romance
Buy: Amazon | Book Depository | B&N 
Source: Purchased (eBook)
Rating:

Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war – and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

I’m the most sporadic blogger ever right now, I’m sorry about that. I really need to get to reviewing all these books I’ve been reading these past few months though, so here’s to trying.

I apologize in advance to everyone who loves this book and/or this series. Nothing against you, just a lot against this book.

I read Shatter Me in June, so it’s quite a long time ago, but even though I don’t remember every detail of the plot (it wasn’t memorable to begin with) I still remember how reading it made me feel.

As you can probably tell by the rating, I couldn’t stand this book. I hated it in that trainwreck kind of way, you just can’t look away because it’s that terrible. It’s so terrible that it made reading it hilarious. This might be one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. The writing style cracked me up several times, I still can’t believe what I read was real.

The metaphors. Oh god the metaphors. The writing style in general. So awful. You just can’t make this shit up. Some find it poetic, I found it pretentious, over the top, and fake deep. Most of the time they do not even MAKE SENSE!!! For a metaphor/simile to be good it HAS TO MAKE SENSE.

Review: The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler

The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
Published by HarperCollins ebooks in October 2009 (first published 1999)
Pages: 416
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Mystery
Source: Purchased
Buy: Amazon | Book Depository | Barnes and Noble
Rating: 

Flannery Culp wants you to know the whole story of her spectacularly awful senior year. Tyrants, perverts, tragic crushes, gossip, cruel jokes, and the hallucinatory effects of absinthe — Flannery and the seven other friends in the Basic Eight have suffered through it all. But now, on tabloid television, they’re calling Flannery a murderer, which is a total lie. It’s true that high school can be so stressful sometimes. And it’s true that sometimes a girl just has to kill someone. But Flannery wants you to know that she’s not a murderer at all — she’s a murderess.

This was Daniel Handler’s, aka Lemony Snicket, debut novel. It’s a character driven novel (as opposed to plot driven) about a group of high schoolers that call themselves the Basic Eight. The book is epistolary, we’re reading the narrator’s journal as she counts down to Halloween, the night she murders her crush, Adam. She tells us in the beginning that she’s writing from prison, so we know she’s been caught and is serving time for her crime. She wants you to know that the media is wrong wrong wrong about her and the Basic Eight.

This is Flannery Culp, a wholly unreliable narrator. But she makes sure you know she’s unreliable, she tells you several times that she’s editing and rewriting her journal, that what you’re reading isn’t necessarily exactly what happened. And if it happened, it might’ve taken place at another point in time. You can’t trust Flannery, that’s part of what makes this novel interesting and fun to read.