Shatter Me (Shatter Me #1) – Tahereh Mafi

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.

DNF REASONING

I think this book gave me a headache. I simply could not finish. I was so excited to read it given some of the rave reviews it got and I love dystopian novels, but the writing was unbearable. It’s one thing to express yourself with a nice vocabulary, paint a picture with metaphors, etc — But that was the whole narrative. Every other sentence was a metaphor or a simile, half of which didn’t even make sense. It wasn’t beautiful and thoughtful — It was distracting and annoying. And what may have even been more annoying was the constant use of strikethrough. Okay. I get it. She’s only had herself to talk to for the past 200-and-however-many-days and she’s tormented and she’s torn about how to interact with people. But enough! Pick a thought and if you need to counteract it, do so like a normal person.

Overall, I just had to stop reading. I could not continue reading a book that was narrated like that. It was confusing, I was annoyed, and really disappointed because I think without the author trying to hard to make an impression and be something different, it could have been a really nice book.