Binged It: The Shatter Me Trilogy

I love series, but I hate waiting for the next book in a series to be released. That’s why I love discovering series that are already finished so I can just binge read the whole series from beginning to end. With that concept in mind I decided to do a new series of blog posts called “Binged It” in which I tell you all about a series of books I’ve recently binged and why I loved or hated it. So here we go.

Number of books: 3 (4 including the novellas bind-up; there will be three more books in the series)

Overall rating: 4/5 stars

Borrow or Buy: Buy!

First of all, the Shatter Me trilogy isn’t actually a trilogy anymore, it’s a series. There will be three more books released, beginning with Restore Me which is coming out on March 6. But I still wanted to binge these books since they’ve been sitting on my shelves for over a year and I wanted to see what the hype was all about.

Thankfully, the hype was well deserved. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it follows Juliette Ferrars who’s been locked up because her touch can literally kill people. However, she’s freed by Warner, who wants to turn her ability into a weapon to help the Establishment, the new government that’s taken over the world. In this dystopian world, the environment has been decimated and the Establishment was supposed to help the world recover and rebuild, but of course that wasn’t what happened at all. Instead, most people are still poor and struggling to survive, while the Establishment does more harm than good.

So, you have Juliette, the heroine, Warner, the villain, and then there’s Adam, a guy from Juliette’s past, who’s obviously the love interest. Except, is anything ever really that simple? No, of course not. This trilogy was filled with twists and even though I was prepared for one because of spoilers, I was still shocked by a few others.

What I loved most about this book was how the author Tahereh Mafi, effectively used the crossing out of some sentences and words in the text for the plot. Juliette keeps a journal in which she wrote down her thoughts while she was locked away and in it she often crossed out her thoughts just like they were crossed out in the books, and I found that so interesting. I’m also really interested to see how that works in an audiobook, because for me I did read everything that was crossed out. It was just a really interesting writing style and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I also loved the characters. Juliette did annoy me at some points, but overall I really liked her. I don’t want to spoil anything by going into my feelings about the other characters, but I will say that I really liked Kenji, a character who becomes Juliette’s good friend. He was a great source of comic relief and I just want him to find his own happiness in these next three books. Also, the romance was great in this book. It gave me all the feels, and there was a good amount of angst and steamy scenes, but not so much that I was irritated.

Honestly, this trilogy really surprised me. I haven’t read a dystopian novel in a long time and I wasn’t sure I would enjoy these but I really loved them. I’m excited to see what the next three books have in store.